Crime and punishment

Jesse James is one of America’s most notorious outlaw heroes. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

How historically accurate are film portrayals of Jesse James?

Hallie Rubenhold. (Photo by Fran Monks)

The women killed by Jack the Ripper

Hallie Rubenhold photographed in London. "In the 19th century, being both poor and a woman was a terrible combination. The cards were stacked against them," she says. (Photography by Fran Monks)

Hallie Rubenhold: “To most people, the women killed by the Ripper are just corpses. I want to tell a different story”

A portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, c1588. (Photo by ACTIVE MUSEUM / Alamy Stock Photo)

“The rankest traitor in all England?” Walter Ralegh on trial

"For those of noble birth who were condemned to die, execution by beheading (which was considered the least brutal method of execution) was used until the 18th century," says criminologist and historian Lizzie Seal. This illustration depicts the execution of Charles I in January 1649. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A brief history of capital punishment in Britain

Jack Sheppard and his accomplice Blueskin rob a home without waking the owner, circa 1720. (Photo by Alamy)

Victorian murder scandal

A cartoon from 1862 shows a pair 'garroters' attacking a victim. (Photo by The Cartoon Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Knife-crime fears: how have we responded through history?

Rogues' gallery: Images of criminals incarcerated in prisons including Wormwood Scrubs and Newcastle City Gaol, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their crimes included stealing clothes, money, boots, and leather. Recent research into Victorian mugshot books – and increasing digital access to court and prison records – offers a different picture of Victorian criminality to the one painted by writers such as Charles Dickens, argues Heather Shore. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

The Library Dark secrets of the Victorian Underworld: did hardened criminals stalk Britain's cities?

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Cesare Lombroso, described as the 'father of criminology'. (Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images)

The ‘born criminal’? Lombroso and the origins of modern criminology

Medieval punishments, Toulouse, 14th century. (Photo by Photo12/UIG via Getty Images)

How bloody was medieval life?

Mary Fulbrook and Richard J Evans. (Photo by Fran Monks)

Second World War

“Many of the Holocaust’s perpetrators got away with it”: why Nazi crimes went unpunished

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

Prohibition protesters parade in a car emblazoned with signs and flags calling for the repeal of the 18th Amendment, which outlawed the production and consumption of alcohol in the United States. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)

“A great social experiment”: your guide to prohibition

Captain Edward Teach, better known as 'Blackbeard', a pirate who plundered the coasts of the West Indies, North Carolina and Virginia. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

6 despicable pirates from history