Crime and punishment - Getty Images

Crime and punishment

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

Stretched, crushed and impaled10 shocking torture methods from medieval history

Medieval torture: everything you wanted to know

Roman soldiers on the detail of Trajan's Column

Why decimation was the most unfair punishment in the Roman Army

Montage of famous assassinations, including Gandhi and JFK.

General History

50 assassinations that changed the world

A crusader army led by French king Louis IX clashes with Ayyubid forces at Mansurah in 1250. Two centuries of warfare across the Middle East “drew a torrent of often dangerous young men into the region”, writes Steve Tibble. (Photo by Getty Images)

Crusader criminals: why medieval knights went rogue in the Holy Land

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: how Gurdip Singh Chaggar's murder in 1976 sparked a youth movement

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

Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell

Illustration shows force-feeding of suffragettes

What was the Cat and Mouse Act? The reason why suffragettes were force-fed

Video podcastVictorian crime and punishment: everything you wanted to know

Victorian crime and punishment: everything you wanted to know

A 21st-century Holocaust trial

A police mugshot of Frank Lee Morris

The shocking Alcatraz escape of 11 June 1962

Alcatraz history: from pelican paradise to prolific prison

Photographs of some of the victims of the 1944 Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane

Second World War

Oradour-sur-Glane massacre: the brutal SS atrocity that still haunts France

From murderous motivations to chivalrous reputationsThe fascinating history of highwaymen

Inside a Jim Crow asylum

Tituba of Salem, in a 19th-century illustration (Photo by The Granger Collection/Alamy)

General Early Modern

5 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of witchcraft

Anne Boleyn pays Mark Smeaton a final visit in Gaetano Donizetti's opera Anna Bolena

He was the court musician who condemned Anne Boleyn: but was Mark Smeaton telling the truth?

OJ Simpson: the trial that gripped the world

OJ Simpson confers with lawyers during his murder trial

What the OJ Simpson trial revealed about modern America

Highwaymen: everything you wanted to know

Video podcastAlcatraz: everything you wanted to know

The outlaw Johannes Bückler, also known as Schinderhannes

Q&AWho was Schinderhannes and why is he known as the ‘German Robin Hood’?

Conspiracy Revisited: The JFK assassination – Oswald’s second murder

Conspiracy Revisited: The JFK assassination – 95 per cent certain?

Newspaper ballad about highwaywoman Susan Higges

The real Renegade Nell? The bloody ballad of female highwaywoman Susan Higges

Video podcastConspiracy: who killed JFK?

An obscenity trial that shocked Victorian Britain

Portrait of John Wilkes Booth

Why did John Wilkes Booth kill Abraham Lincoln? And how was he caught?