Crime and punishment

A woman on a medieval ducking stool

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

An 18th-century public execution and crowd

Q&A When did people stop attending public executions in Britain?

Criminal register photographs at Wormwood Scrubs prison, around 1890. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

Prisoner dilemmas

19th-century mugshots

The real Peaky Blinders

Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico's left-wing president who in 1940 legalised drugs. (Photo by Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The year Mexico legalised drugs

One of the earliest and most famous examples of extremism comes from ancient Rome. Starting in 264 BC and continuing for more than a century, Rome engaged in a series of wars with neighbouring Carthage. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A brief history of extremism – from ancient Rome to al Qaeda

Sir Walter Raleigh bids goodbye to his wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton

Q&A Why was Sir Walter Ralegh executed?

Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark. The BBC television drama is putting Cornwall’s coastline at risk of

Poldark, Peaky Blinders and 6 other historical TV shows that have tourists flocking to Britain

Ruth Ellis and her friend Desmond Cussen, who supplied the gun with which she shot David Blakely. (Photo by Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo)

Ruth Ellis and the hanging that rocked a nation

Charles I. (Photo by World History Archive/Alamy)

King killers in America

A police officer uses his baton on a protester in Glasgow, 1919

1919: Britain’s red summer

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

Through MK ULtra's experiments, often performed on unwitting test subjects, the CIA hoped to make 'brainwashing' real. (Image by RF CREATIVE/Getty Images)

MK Ultra: the secrets of the CIA’s mind-control programme

In 1937, Amelia Earhart, one of the world’s most famous aviators, apparently disappeared without a trace during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

From Jack the Ripper to Amelia Earhart: 17 unsolved historical mysteries

Funeral of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme

Who killed Olof Palme?