20th Century - Getty Images

20th Century

Pauline Black and Billie Holiday

My history heroPauline Black chooses Billie Holiday.

Barmier than Bond: Ian Fleming's extraordinary wartime escapades.

CIA book smugglers of the Cold War.

Winston Churchill and Winston the Platypus

Second World War

Winston and the platypus: how a bizarre WW2 diplomacy mission to influence Churchill ended in death and tragedy

"These women transformed his understanding of the world": making Malcolm X.

The Third Reich's first genocide.

D-Day: the spearhead of the invasion.

A pink tissue box with a white tissue coming out of it

From Operation Snuffles to Killer Kleenex: the forgotten history of the secret Cold War experiments in Antarctica has just been uncovered

Captured Boer fighters from General Cronjé’s command sit on the dusty ground near Modder River, awaiting tent assignments in a British prison camp during the Second Boer War (1899–1902).

She exposed the horrors of Britain’s secret concentration camps – so why was she demonised?

The Enola Gay aircraft, which dropped the first atomic bomb of the Second World War on Hiroshima.

Second World War

Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified?

Calamity Jane: life of the week.

Spiritual showmen: the 1920s occult.

Two boys dressed in thick coats and hats rummage through the ground for potatoes

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed".

Danny Robins and Harry Price

My history heroDanny Robins chooses Harry Price

The Einstein murders.

Peaks, perils, and pioneers: the deadly history of mountaineering.

Josephine Baker: life of the week.

John Kennedy and Barry Goldwater

Was JFK about to be re-elected? An expert weighs in on the president's lost second term

What caused the Irish Famine?.

Could America have won the Vietnam War? The mistakes that denied the US victory.

The "outwardly respectable" man who had a body in his basement: how the Dr Crippen case shocked Britain.

JFK and Marilyn Monroe

“Risks he should never have taken”: a historian’s take on JFK’s sexual waywardness

Josephine Baker's famous banana skirt, which was introduced for Baker’s performance at Paris’s Folies Bergère – an act with which she soon became synonymous.

Singer, dancer, Nazi-fighter: how Josephine Baker became a WW2 heroine.

RAF fliers accompany the bodies of two Nazi airmen being taken to be buried in Edinburgh

In October 1939, two coffins were wheeled through Edinburgh draped in Nazi flags. But why?.

A 1950s advertisement for the paint company Robbialac, depicting a couple preparing food. (Photo by Getty Images)

Is this the most despicable home furnishing trend in British history?

Could the US have won the Vietnam war?.

A fireman pulls his hose through the smouldering ruins of a bombed out church in London in the Blitz.

Second World War

WW2’s ‘Blackout Ripper’: how a respected war hero manipulated the Blitz and became a serial killer

The women's orchestra of Auschwitz.

JFK: the man behind the myths.

A photograph of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Second World War

Simon Schama on British history if Hitler had beaten Churchill: "The Holocaust would have happened here"