Georgian - Getty Images

Georgian

Jane Austen's fiction: an accurate portrayal of life in Georgian England?

The orphan hero who fought at Trafalgar

England’s sporting obsession

This engraving by William Hogarth shows the final instalment of a sequence of artworks called 'The Four Stages of Cruelty' (1751). In it, the fictional Tom Nero is being dissected for anatomical studies at Cutlerian theatre near Newgate prison after being hanged for murder. Nero looks like the Dead-Alive, as though he can see and smell his own executed body on the dissection table. The chief physician sits in the centre on a high-backed chair, resembling a high court judge. He is surrounded by various medical men, including penal surgeons, who did gallows work. The skeletons of dissected criminals were usually refused a Christian burial and so were displayed as specimens, as can be seen top left and top right. (Photo by Guildhall Library/Getty Images)

Surviving the gallows: the Georgian hangings that didn't go to plan

The colonial secrets of Britain’s stately homes

Princess Elizabeth (the future Queen Elizabeth II) and Princess Margaret as Prince Charming and Cinderella in a 1941 pantomime

Q&AWhat are the origins of the Christmas pantomime?

A 19th-century engraving of Francis Grose

History heroSusie Dent chooses Francis Grose (1731–1791)

Your guide to...debtors' prisons

The Wild West: everything you wanted to know

A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft: reclaiming the reputation of a feminist icon

Lucy Worsley in Regency period costume

Lucy Worsley on royal history's biggest fibs

George Washington

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

The Regency era: everything you wanted to know

Enslaved women & resistance

Relatives wave off convicts being sent from England

Your guide to...transportation to Australia

A painting by Louis Philippe Crepin depicting the battle of Trafalgar, 1805. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

The battle of Trafalgar, hour by hour: what happened and why did Britain win?

The French Revolution: Everything you need to know

An Atlantic slave war

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

A photograph of the Tower of London, from the river

Anne Boleyn, Beefeaters, Guy Fawkes and the princes: a brief history of the Tower of London

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

François-Dominique Toussaint L'ouverture

Toussaint Louverture’s revolutionary life

Napoleon watches on as the fighting at Waterloo unfolds in this 1843 painting

What if…Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo

An official of the British East India Company riding on an elephant with an escort of foot soldiers and mounted Indian retainers, India, end of 18th century (Photo by Getty Images)

The East India Company: everything you wanted to know

How did England react to the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1751? (Illustration for BBC History Magazine)

Q&ADid the introduction of the Gregorian calendar spark riots?

A late 18th-century painting of British and French sailors going head-to-head at war

The uncommon lives of common sailors

Mary Toft, perpetrator of the 1726 hoax – in which she appeared to give birth to rabbits

The woman who gave birth to rabbits? How Mary Toft's hoax captured Georgian society

As seen in this early 19th-century depiction of an initiation, Masons have long used secrecy to "create a sense of awe and specialness around their rituals". (Image by Alamy)

A history of Freemasonry: from Enlightenment ideals to satanic conspiracy stories

The story of the Freemasons