General Modern

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Documents that changed the world

Dr Michael Mosley holds up a tapeworm

Tapeworms, arsenic and magic soap: fact-checking history’s weirdest fad diets and weight-loss gimmicks

Fasil Ghebbi, a 17th-century fortress city in Gondar, Ethiopia. (Photo by Getty Images)

Peter Frankopan on global history in 2020

In need of some summer reading inspiration? Check out our list of favourite biographies, era-spanning epics and much else besides. (Photo by Goodluz/Alamy Stock Photo)

Summer reads 2020: the best history books to take on holiday (or staycation)

The Suez canal

How significant was the Suez Crisis?

The Kray brothers

The A-Z of British gangs and gangsters

American abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass, c 1866. (Photo by Shutterstock)

African American abolitionists in Britain

Mary, Queen of Scots

9 of the worst monarchs in history

The battle of First Bar, 1841

Your guide to... the Opium Wars

A stone believed to have magical properties, including the ability to summon rain, from Laraibina village in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. (Photo by Getty Images)

A history of magic

The original ‘Big Three’ at Livadia Palace in Yalta: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. None of them came away from the summit with everything they had hoped for. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

Second World War

Your guide to... the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, 1945

A portrait of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, 1806. (Photo by IanDagnall Computing/Alamy Stock Photo)

The dark side of Alexander Hamilton

York Minster's rose window features 16th-century Tudor Roses white on red (left) and Lancastrian Roses, red

A brief history of the English rose

Paul Stephenson and Guy Bailey

The great British civil rights scandal: the Bristol bus boycott

'Tippoo's Tiger', made for Tipu Sultan. (Photo by Alamy)

General ancient history

Museums and colonialism