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Crime and punishment

Grisly killings & mysterious motives: murder in early modern Britain

An artist’s impression of Frances Saunders printed in an edition of the Weekly Dispatch, in which she was incorrectly named ‘Mrs Francis’

Nell Darby's historical cold casesThe strange case of 'Mr Francis'

A street in Whitechapel: the last crime of Jack the Ripper, from 'Le Petit Parisien', 1891.

Historical cold casesMurder in the year of the Ripper

An audacious kidnapping in 1970s Paris

Billy the Kid, also known as William H Bonney, was one of the most notorious gunslingers in the Wild West

Billy the KidThe Wild West's most wanted gunslinger

ConspiracyDid Anastasia survive the massacre of the Romanovs?

The floating hell of prison hulks

Illustration of Major Stede Bonnet, the Gentleman Pirate

Stede Bonnet, Gentleman Pirate: how a mid-life crisis created the 'worst pirate of all time'

Emmett TillThe murder that reshaped the American civil rights movement

J. Edgar Hoover holding a gun

How J Edgar Hoover secretly ruled America

The cover of Le Petit Journal, 13 January 1895, showing the "degradation" of Alfred Dreyfus during which his sword was snapped over a warrant officer’s knee (Photo by Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images)

The Dreyfus Affair: how France was divided over a miscarriage of justice

Historical cold casesThe mystery of the vanishing widow

An unhappy looking woman on trial in a British Victorian court. From ‘The Graphic - An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper’ from 4th March 1882. ‘The Graphic’ was published by Illustrated Newspapers Ltd as a rival to ‘Illustrated London News’. (Picture by GettyImages)

Historical cold cases with Nell DarbyThe mystery of Miss Lamond

Desk killers: the psychology of committing crimes against humanity

An engraving of a prison hulk at Deptford, from a c1826 painting. (Photo by: Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Floating hell: the brutal history of prison hulks

Protesters gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice during the 2003 Hutton inquiry into claims, broadcast on the BBC, that the case for war in Iraq had been “sexed up”.

BBC at 100Rocked by scandal

Herbert Rowse ArmstrongInnocent solicitor or guilty murderer?

The CIA: everything you wanted to know

A portrait of a young Queen Victoria from around the time of the first assassination attempt in 1840

What if…Queen Victoria had been assassinated?

Treason: from Anne Boleyn to Lord Haw Haw

Oscar Wilde with Lord Alfred Douglas in 1893

From Oscar Wilde to David Irving: 9 landmark libel & defamation cases through history

The vanishing inventor

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, with his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, riding in an open carriage at Sarajevo shortly before their assassination on 28 June 1914

Franz Ferdinand“This mythologised murder did not trigger WW1”

Historian Joyce Lee Malcolm

Joyce Lee Malcolm on gun ownership in America“Why is the right to be armed such an emotional one for Americans? No police force can protect everyone, or even any one, all of the time”

A policeman searches an African-American man, 1970s

Why we should remember…Richard Nixon's war on drugs

Watergate at 50: the making of an American scandal

US president Richard Nixon in 1970

After Watergate: the fallout of an American scandal

Princess Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour (Photos by Getty and Alamy)

Did Thomas Seymour sexually abuse the teenage Princess Elizabeth?

Crime & punishment in Britain: everything you wanted to know

A customer shops for a pistol at Freddie Bear Sports sporting goods store in Tinley Park, Illinois

The historians’ view: what are the real issues in the US gun control debate?