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King James III of Scotland (Photo by Hi-Story/Alamy Stock Photo)

The murder of James III: who killed the king of Scots?

Ruth Ellis and her friend Desmond Cussen

The true story of Ruth Ellis and the hanging that rocked a nation

The 'Blue People' of Kentucky

Blue Fugates: the rare blood disorder that turned the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ blue

The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation

The rise of the Nazis and the importance of heeding warnings

"I felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad": the experiences of evacuees in WW2

England’s forgotten medieval hero: how John, Duke of Bedford carried on Henry V's fight

A 20th-century painting shows John applying his seal to the 1215 charter

Henry III and the Magna Carta that mattered

"Nothing matches being with Alexander the Great on foot in the Hindu Kush"

An illustration of the future King Edward VI of England with his whipping boy (Photo by Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo)

“Literally whipped”: the boys who took the beatings meant for royal bottoms

An engraving of Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett for Jane Austen's novel 'Pride and Prejudice' (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Honeymooning with your mother-in-law? The truths of Regency romance

Queen Catherine the Great and (inset) a horse

Did Catherine the Great really have sex with a horse?

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo: the Renaissance polymath who transformed Western art

A c1300 depiction of a man paying taxes

Do you know the correct date of Magna Carta? Here’s why you might be wrong

Farmers standing in a field

Where does the term redneck come from?

John F Kennedy in 1960 (left) and would-be assassin Richard Pavlick

The JFK assassination attempt you’ve never heard of

A Japanese woodblock print, c1855, depicting the mythological giant catfish Namazu, and the god Takemikazuchi subduing it with the kaname-ishi stone (Photo by Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

General History

Why is a mythical catfish to blame for earthquakes in Japan?

Maria Theresa

General Early Modern

The incredible Habsburg empress you’ve never heard of: who was Maria Theresa?

Portrait of Jane Austen as a young woman.

The real reason Jane Austen never married

An artist's impression of the scene on the track, hours after the Abergele Train Disaster, a carriage is on its side and smoke billows from the wreck

An inferno that claimed 33 lives: the story of a deadly Victorian disaster

The hydroelectric power plants at Niagara Falls, seen in 1890, would have been a key target for the US in War Plan Red (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

War Plan Red: The secret US plan for war with Britain via Canada

The rise of the Nazi party | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture

The Fall of the Titans, 1588-90, painting by Cornelis van Haarlem (Photo by PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

When gods go to war: what was the Titanomachy of Greek mythology?

Adolf Hitler – at the time chancellor of Austria – is saluted by the crowds as he makes his way to the great parade of troops in Vienna, Austria, March 1938. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Second World War

Timeline: the rise and fall of the Third Reich

“The reverberations lasted for generations” | Matthew Gabriele and David M Perry on the civil war of Charlemagne's grandsons

Lilian Lenton, collage by Rachel Dickens

Lilian Lenton, the 'Elusive Pimpernel': the courageous and daring suffragette who took direct action

How to build a radical: what the Gunpowder Plot can teach us about extremism today

Who was the greatest President of the United States in history?

The palace of Kublai Khan’s son is illustrated in a 15th-century manuscript of the Travels of Marco Polo. Despite such vivid depictions, no reference to the Venetian merchant has ever been found in Chinese sources.

Do The Travels of Marco Polo belong in the non-fiction section, or fantasy?

A hill to die on: why the Allies almost failed in the battle of Monte Cassino in WW2