American history

Atomic bomb damage in the city of Hiroshima, 1945. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 “razed and burnt around 70 per cent of all buildings”, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Second World War

Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? You debate

Grace Humiston was nicknamed 'Mrs Sherlock Holmes' by the American press. (Image courtesy of Brad Ricca)

First World War

America’s ‘Mrs Holmes’: how one woman took on the cases the NYPD couldn’t solve

An example of the Zimmermann Telegram

First World War

The Zimmermann telegram: the telegram that brought America into the First World War

French government officials at an inaugural tour to mark the completion of the main structural work on the Eiffel Tower, c1889. (Time Life Pictures/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Second World War

10 historical events that happened in March

'Soccer' and 'diaper' are among many 'American' words that are more faithful to the old English tongue than those used in Britain today, says James Evans. Other 'Americanisms' were used in Shakespeare's plays before the first English colony was established in Virginia. (L to R: Photos by Hulton Archive/Getty Images; DeAgostini/Getty Images; Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

From candy to diapers: the purity of American English

Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, seated from left to right, in Yalta for the 'Big Three' Conference. In February 1945, British diplomats were already joking that it was actually a conference of the ‘Big Two-and-a-Half’. (Photo by Keystone Features/Getty Images)

Second World War

WW2: When Britain stood (not quite) alone

The 30th Annual Academy Awards, Los Angeles, 1958. (Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

13 remarkable moments in the history of the Oscars

The crew of ‘Mi Amigo’. The pilot, 23-year-old Lt John Kriegshauser, can be seen in the front row, far left. (Photo courtesy of Sheffield County Council via American Air Museum in Britain)

Second World War

Mi Amigo: the deadly WW2 bomber crash in Sheffield play park that killed 10 airmen

George Washington

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

Issue 14 of BBC World Histories Magazine.

Issue 14 of BBC World Histories is out now

Members of the Ku Klux Klan march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC in 1925. The Klan of this era was a terrorist group in the precise meaning of that term, says Linda Gordon. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

When the Ku Klux Klan was a mass movement

A painting of America’s founding fathers inside the National Archives in Washington DC. (Photo by Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images)

A history of United States government shutdowns

BBC Breakfast's Dan Walker with Tony Foulds, 82, who for nearly 75 years has tended the memorial of 10 US airmen who were killed when their B-17 crashed in Endcliffe Park in Sheffield in February 1944. Tony witnessed the crash as an eight-year-old boy. (Photo courtesy of Dan Walker)

Second World War

“We got Tony a fly-past”: how BBC’s Dan Walker organised tribute to WW2 plane crash heroes in Sheffield

Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi is held aloft by his team after clinching a division title in 1960. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)

A brief history of American football and the Super Bowl