Period

Margaret Thatcher enters Downing Street

How to win an election: 25 general elections and where they were won – and lost

Tourists at Stonehenge

General prehistory

Stonehenge: a prehistoric tourist trap

Lucy Worsley’s Christmas Carol Odyssey. (Image by BBC/Lorian Reed-Drake)

History TV and radio: what’s on next week? (7–13 December)

The Cunard liner Lusitania

First World War

How did Britain react to the sinking of the Lusitania?

Queen Elizabeth I

“All unperfect and incorrect”: Tracy Borman on the discovery of an Elizabethan gem

Ragnar Lothbrok. (Illustration by Georgie Gozem for BBC History Magazine)

Ragnar Lothbrok: the legend of the immortal Viking and his sons

Three elderly men on a bench in London's Southall, circa 1980. (Photo by Getty Images)

Asians in 1980s Britain

A 15th-century miniature from 'La Vraye Histoire du Bon Roy Alixandre'. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

6 Christmas party tips from the past

German-born physicist Albert Einstein.

5 things you (probably) didn’t know about Albert Einstein

The figure of Santa Claus is the very embodiment of the modern American secular Christmas. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)

How America captured Christmas

Alfred the Great (849–899). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Who was King Alfred the Great?

The battleship USS California following the attack at Pearl Harbor

Second World War

12 things you (probably) didn’t know about Pearl Harbor

Tom Smith's Surprise Cosaques, Christmas Crackers 1878. (Image by Getty)

The history of Christmas crackers

Three monarchs who stepped down through history: Kaiser Wilhem II; Anne of Cleves; and James VII and II. (Images by Getty)

Retiring royals: 9 rulers and royals who stepped down through history

A family at the seaside in the 1960s.

In pictures: English life in the 1960s, photographed by Tony Ray-Jones