Feature

A Hawker Hurricane of Fighter Command on its way to intercept German bombers as they crossed the south coast of England during the Battle of Britain, 1940. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Second World War

6 Battle of Britain myths

BBC/See-Saw Films/Nick Wall

“A dead whale or a stove boat”: whaling in the 19th century

An illustration showing a woman 'Arib al-Ma’muniyya, playing an instrument while four men listen. A chess board is in the foreground

‘Arib al-Ma’muniyya: the enslaved medieval woman who sang her way to wealth

An Israeli pilot after the raid on Entebbe

Operation Thunderbolt: Was the 1976 ‘raid on Entebbe’ a brilliant rescue?

On this day_Numbers13

13 September

An Anglo-Saxon cross from the church of St Michael

Anglo-Saxon conversion: the coming of the cross (at the point of a sword)

Two Hitler Youth who have surrendered to Allied Forces, Germany, 1945. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

First World War

Innocence under fire: how children were used in warfare of the past

Historian Bettany Hughes in front of the Rock of Gibraltar

Bettany Hughes “We were trying to find stories that tell us about resilience – history as a kind of therapy”

A 'teacher' in Milgram's study is instructed to administer an electric shock to a 'learner'.

Experiments in evil: the shocking efforts to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust

Historian Alex Von Tunzelmann. (Photographed by Fran Monks for BBC History Magazine)

Alex Von Tunzelmann “Debates about statues are often posed in simplistic primary colours”

A plane crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center

9/11: Twenty years on

Allied convoy PQ 17 is attacked by a German torpedo aircraft on its way across the Arctic Ocean, c1942. (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Second World War

“The worst journey in the world”: the Arctic convoys of the Second World War

US secretary of state William Seward (seated left) signs the agreement to buy Alaska from Russia in 1867

America’s hidden empire: the USA’s forgotten imperial expansion

Illustration showing the traders who made a fortune during the wake of the Black Death

Merchants of doom: the traders who profited from the Black Death

A portrait of Princess Elizabeth

The birth of Elizabeth I: everything you need to know