Location

Workers repair Fleet sewer in 1854. London’s creaking sewer network sparked anxieties over what lay beneath the sprawling capital. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Living in fear: the dangers of Victorian London

Portrait of founding father Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull

Your guide to Alexander Hamilton, plus 6 fascinating facts about the founding father

'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' (2020): Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. (Photo by David Lee/Netflix)

Who was Ma Rainey, “mother of the blues”?

Alex Hogh Andersen as Ivar the Boneless

The real Vikings: the early medieval world behind the hit drama

Monument to Prince Vladimir the Great in Moscow

Q&AWho were the Kievan Rus and what do they have to do with the Vikings?

Habsburg dynasty: Maria Theresa, her husband Francis I

The Habsburgs: the dynasty that wouldn’t die

Invention or adaptation: what did the Romans really do for us?

Vahalla is depicted as a round-topped building in this funerary stone from 8th-century Sweden

Valhalla: fighting and feasting in the Viking warrior afterlife

A miller and a donkey

9 things you could do with a medieval ass

Ten things to do with a medieval donkey

Marble bust of Nero

Rethinking Nero: was the Roman emperor really so bad?

Canterbury Cathedral

How Thomas Becket's feud with Henry II led to murder

Edward Jenner

Q&AWhen did medical practitioners start to be called ‘doctor’?

Magna Carta: everything you wanted to know

Richard III

Richard the radical: was Richard III a champion of the people?

Richard III, Queen Victoria and Henry VIII. (Photos by Getty Images)

Monarchy history quiz: test your knowledge of these kings and queens

Cundill Prize-winner Camilla Townsend on global history

One of the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo

How dark were the Dark Ages?

Portchester Castle in Hampshire was intended as a coastal defence against raiders. (Photo by Getty Images)

The collapse of Roman Britain: what happened, plus 9 places which tell us more

Fishbourne Roman Palace, plus 5 more Roman mosaics you can explore in Britain

Wrens operating the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park, 1943

Second World War

Your guide to Bletchley Park, the key WW2 decryption centre

This 15th-century painting from a manuscript shows men fishing in a river. In medieval England, eels were both meals and de facto currency. (Photo by Bridgeman)

Fishing for gold: how eels powered the medieval economy

The death of John Lennon: what happened?

Almond Hedgehog: A debonair addition to the hostess’s armoury in the Georgian period. (Illustration by Clair Rossiter for BBC History Magazine)

What was the best meal in history?

Jane Austen's fiction: an accurate portrayal of life in Georgian England?

Fern Riddell.

Fern Riddell"Can we call the suffragettes terrorists? Absolutely"

Rushton Triangular Lodge was ostensibly a warrener's lodge but the biblical references that adorn its three exterior walls tell a different story. (Photo English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

History explorer: Catholic resistance to Elizabeth I

Alfred Nobel (Bettmann/Getty Images)

The history of the Nobel Prizes

The Glorious Revolution: everything you wanted to know

This engraving by William Hogarth shows the final instalment of a sequence of artworks called 'The Four Stages of Cruelty' (1751). In it, the fictional Tom Nero is being dissected for anatomical studies at Cutlerian theatre near Newgate prison after being hanged for murder. Nero looks like the Dead-Alive, as though he can see and smell his own executed body on the dissection table. The chief physician sits in the centre on a high-backed chair, resembling a high court judge. He is surrounded by various medical men, including penal surgeons, who did gallows work. The skeletons of dissected criminals were usually refused a Christian burial and so were displayed as specimens, as can be seen top left and top right. (Photo by Guildhall Library/Getty Images)

Surviving the gallows: the Georgian hangings that didn't go to plan