Crime and punishment

A pirate ship flying the Jolly Roger closes in on another vessel during a storm

The golden age of piracy: when pirates ruled the waves?

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)

The most famous and despicable pirates from history

The Jolly Roger, a black flag showing a skuyll and crossbones. (Photo by Henry Guttmann Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Q&A Did all pirates fly the Jolly Roger?

A pirate uses his cutlass to force a bound and blindfolded man to walk the plank

Q&A Was walking the plank a real pirate punishment?

Pirates burying a treasure chest on a beach as their captain looks on

Q&A X marks the spot: did pirates bury their treasure?

A 17th century sketch of a peg-legged pirate walking with the aid of crutches

Q&A Did any real pirates wear eyepatches or have peg legs?

Pod Tom Morris WL

A murder mystery in 19th-century Dublin

Hillsborough Disaster floral tributes

A brief history of the Hillsborough disaster and justice campaigner Anne Williams

Photograph of Bass Reeves, the first black deputy US marshal west of the Mississippi River

From slave to real Lone Ranger? The incredible life of black Wild West lawman Bass Reeves

Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin. (Getty Images)

First World War

Did a British agent murder Rasputin?

Black and white image of island prison, taken from the sky

The battle of Alcatraz, 1946: the most violent escape attempt in the prison’s history

John Callow discusses the tragic case of the Bideford witches, the last women in England to be executed for the crime of witchcraft. (Image by Getty Images)

England’s last witches

Froissart illustration of Hugh Despenser the Younger's execution by being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despenser is on a ladder, as a man beside him disembowels him and tosses his entrails into a fire

‘Godly butchery’: the horrifying history of hanging, drawing and quartering

English highwayman Dick Turpin is pictured astride his horse, leaping over a gate, as he flees his pursuers

The extraordinary legend of highwayman Dick Turpin

An illustration shows a sailor throwing an enslaved person into the sea, with other enslaved people below drowning

The Zong Massacre: what the dark episode meant for the British slave trade and abolition