BBC History Magazine

The online archive of articles from BBC History Magazine

A portrait of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife. Henry and Catherine's marriage was a happy one, until their failure to produce a male heir began to cast a long shadow. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)

Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s greatest queen

Illustration shows James IV ceding his crown following defeat at the battle of Flodden. (Picture by Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

Your guide to the battle of Flodden 1513

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria’s voracious appetite for food and sex

A section of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting Harold Godwinson being crowned king of England. Harold was the last Anglo-Saxon king of England and was killed by William, Duke of Normandy at the battle of Hastings in 1066. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

1066: eight days that rocked England

Edward the Confessor seated at a banquet

Edward the Confessor: England’s holy hardman

ever before,” says Margaret MacMillan. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)

“We’ve come to think that peace is normal, but that’s not the reality”: Margaret MacMillan on humanity’s compulsion to go to war

Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Even after her death in 2013, her record continued to be fiercely contested. (Tom Stoddart/Getty Images)

How should history remember Margaret Thatcher?

A photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken after his November 1860 election and before his March 1861 inauguration.

How Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election victory set America on the path to Civil War

The battle of Dover, 24 August 1217, (image c1880). (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)

Eustace the Monk: one of medieval Europe’s unholiest holy men

Tom Cribb lands a punch on Tom Molineaux while Molineaux's trainer, Bill Richmond, looks on. Molineaux got the upper hand in the pair's first fight – which ended in controversy when a mob stormed the ring – but was defeated in this, the 1811 rematch. (Edward Gooch/Edward Gooch/Getty Images)

The ‘Black Terror’: the story of Britain’s first black sports star

Portrait of Catherine of Aragon

Catherine of Aragon: Spain’s Virgin queen?

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

Portrait of an African man, c1530

The missing Tudors: black people in 16th-century England

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