20th Century

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler watch a Nazi parade staged for the Italian dictators's visit to Germany. (Photo by Getty Images)

Dictators explained

100 women who changed the world

Women’s history month: 11 podcasts to listen to

Women 'take the air' in an attempt to ward off the Spanish Flu

First World War

“Far too little, too late”: what happened when Spanish Flu hit Britain a century ago?

In 1926, 19-year-old New Yorker Gertrude Ederle made history by becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel – and in a faster time than the five men who had already achieved the feat. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Gertrude Ederle: the first woman to swim the English Channel

Four women dressed in the perceived fashion of the roaring twenties in a 1954 musical called ‘The Boy Friend’. (Photo by Getty Images)

How the ‘Roaring Twenties’ myth obscures the making of modern Britain

Writer Virginia Woolf photographed in 1932. (Photo by ullstein bild via Getty Images)

London’s trailblazing women

New issue World 21 1024x768

Issue 21 of BBC World Histories is out now

Keith Granville, managing director of BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation), holding a model of the Boeing 747 jet, with the new aircraft hangars under construction in the background, at Heathrow Airport, 17 March 1969. (Photo by Jim Gray/Keystone/Getty Images)

In pictures: the history of London’s Heathrow Airport

“I have a dream”: the story of Martin Luther King’s struggle for civil rights in America

Nancy Astor on the campaign trail in 1919

Nancy Astor facts: who was the first female MP in British history to take her seat in parliament?

A copper engraving of Margaret Pole's execution

General Early Modern

Are these the worst botched executions in history?

Millennium Centre, Cardiff. (Photo by Dreamstime)

Simon Jenkins: “Wales needs to get over England and be Wales again”

Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump

From Lincoln to Trump: a brief history of the US Republican Party

Cat burglars scaled walls and climbed through lofty windows. (Illustration by Rachel Dickens for BBC History Magazine)

The rise of the cat burglar

Sylvia Pankhurst is taken into custody

My history hero Emma Barnett chooses Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960)