HistoryExtra

Your search results

Showing 1 to 30 of 180 results

“Impaled on a stake and left to die”: crime, punishment and law enforcement in ancient Egypt.

Roman soldiers on the detail of Trajan's Column

Why decimation was the most unfair punishment in the Roman Army

The Forty Elephants gang with an inset of Diamond Annie

Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang

A man in medieval attire hands another man an arrow

Was there a real Sheriff of Nottingham?

A sketch showing a woman surrounded by men. One man is putting a hood over her head and another is reading from a book next to her

These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?.

A woman on a medieval ducking stool

Q&AQ&A: Were ducking stools ever used as punishment for crimes other than witchcraft during the Middle Ages?

Illustration of a demon breathing fire with springs on his shoes jumping and scaring two women

Spring-Heeled Jack: the fire-breathing phantom that terrorised Victorian England

Illustration of soldiers in medieval armour killing peasant women

Why it was more dangerous to steal a loaf of bread than commit murder in medieval England

An 1872 illustration from the weekly newspaper Days’ Doings shows a shoplifter being apprehended (Photo by Look and Learn/Rosenberg Collection/Bridgeman Images)

Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld.

The school for girls imprisoned at Tothill Fields in the late 1850s. A dedicated schoolmistress was employed to teach that institution’s large female population; in other prisons, the matron took lessons. (Engraving from Chronicle, via Alamy)

Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools.

Gilles de Rais, accused of murdering at least 140 children in 15th-century France

Was Gilles de Rais really history’s first recorded serial killer?

A fairy in a green dress balances on the palm of a hand with a yellow background

Don’t fear the fairies – but do allow a little enchantment into your life.

English author Agatha Christie, pictured at a dinner in 1957. By this time, she was one of the world’s best-selling writers, renowned for her detective fiction featuring characters such as Hercule Poirot.

A real Thursday Murder Club? How a team of crime fiction writers tried to save the genre (and solve crimes)

Hand-coloured engraving of someone being tortured on the wheel.

Stretched, crushed and impaled10 shocking torture methods from medieval history

Supplies train for the Russian transported during deportation to Siberia.

Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island

A collage of a man in Nazi uniform in front of a large building

I've just been inside a Nazi monster's mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting.

Two women share a tender moment, c1902

Q&AHas it ever been a crime to be lesbian in England?.

Defendants at the Nuremberg Trials listen to proceedings in 1946. In the front row sit Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner; behind them are Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, and Fritz Sauckel. Together they represent the senior leadership of the Nazi regime held to account for its crimes.

Second World War

“I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg”

The princes in the Tower

Have we finally unmasked the killer of the Princes in the Tower?

Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France.

Tudor angels of death: the 16th-century obsession with female killers.

Priest's Hole, formerly a medieval sewer, beneath the kitchen in Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire.

A perilous game of hide and seekThe history of priest holes and hunters

Portrait of Coch Bach y Bala

Who was ‘The Welsh Houdini’?Coch Bach y Bala, the legendary prison escape artist.

A woman dressed in a grey top and a green and orange bandana holds a black and white photograph of a young man against her chin. She stands in front of a plain, yellow wall

The Srebrenica massacre: the worst atrocity committed on European soil since the Second World War.

John F Kennedy in 1960 (left) and would-be assassin Richard Pavlick

The JFK assassination attempt you’ve never heard of

Burke and Hare

Burke and HareLisa Rosner on the pair's crime spree.

A police mugshot of Frank Lee Morris

The shocking Alcatraz escape of 11 June 1962

Alcatraz history: from pelican paradise to prolific prison

A composite image of post-medieval women being persecuted.

In post-medieval Scotland, two specific crimes reveal the challenges faced by ordinary women

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