North America

9 things you (probably) didn’t know about Helen Keller

Editor’s pick: Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton

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”?

The death of John Lennon: what happened?

Second World War

Caught off guard: why didn't America see Pearl Harbor coming?

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after her arrest

Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat: what happened next?

A brief history of turkeys, plus why we eat a turkey dinner at Christmas

A policewoman gives directions to tourists in London in the 1920s.

“Sherlock Holmes in skirts”: the world's first policewomen

The First Thanksgiving in 1621, after a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme; screen print, 1932. (Photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

7 facts you might not know about the history of Thanksgiving

The Wild West: everything you wanted to know

War and society: a tangled relationship

An RAF crew with their American Douglas Boston light bomber, circa 1943. (Photo by Getty Images)

Personal stories of the Second World War

President Nixon making final TV address

The 5 most notorious presidents in US history

George Washington

American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know

Adventure and opportunity: female transatlantic travellers

The Hughes Glomar Explorer was a salvage vessel disguised as a mining ship, designed to secretly recover Soviet sub K-129

Project Azorian: the Cold War CIA mission to snatch Soviet nuclear sub K-129 from the sea floor

The dispossession of Native Americans

Photo of Abraham Lincoln

Q&ADid Abraham Lincoln’s beard win him the election?

Halloween postcard

10 things you didn’t know about the history (and mystery) of Halloween

Life in bondage Formerly enslaved African-Americans sit for a photograph in Virginia, c1850. At that time, 4 million people were still enslaved across the US, as debates around abolition raged on both sides of the Atlantic (Photo by Fotosearch/Getty Images)

The black abolitionists who shocked Victorian Britain

An illustration of slaves picking cotton on a plantation. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

David Olusoga"Black history affects all of us – it is British history"

Afua Hirsh with her ‘Enslaved’ co-presenters Simcha Jacobovici and Samuel L Jackson

Afua Hirsch on tracing the story of the transatlantic slave trade

The ‘Pilgrims’ stride onto American soil in 1620 after crossing the Atlantic on the Mayflower, as shown in a 20th-century painting. The colony that they established was – initially, at least – a genuinely enlightened place, writes James Evans. (Photo by Harold M. Lambert/Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Myth of the Mayflower: the voyage that made America?

Writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson at her home in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Alamy)

Isabel Wilkerson: “Caste is like the wind. You may not be able to see it, but it’s a quietly destructive force”

The Mayflower

JFK: the path to power

Pilgrim Fathers boarding the Mayflower

5 facts about the Mayflower

Illustration by Joey Guidone

The big question: has terrorism ever achieved its aims?

Isabel Wilkerson on caste in America