Crime and punishment - Getty Images

Crime and punishment

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

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

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

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

In late 1781, the crew of the slave ship Zong, facing a shortage of water, threw overboard much of their ‘cargo’. The massacre of 133 African people and resulting law case – not for murder, but insurance – focusses attention to the treatment of enslaved people. (Image by Alamy)

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

Salem: Investigating the Witch Trials HistoryExtra podcast series title card

Salem witch trialsEpisode 9: conclusion.

Salem: Investigating the Witch Trials HistoryExtra podcast series title card

Salem witch trialsEpisode 7: Quarrelsome neighbours & family tensions.

Salem: Investigating the Witch Trials HistoryExtra podcast series title card

Salem witch trialsEpisode 6: Chaos in the courtroom.

Guy Fawkes and the men behind the gunpowder plot. Guy Fawkes, best known of the conspirators, is third from the right. (Print Collector/Getty Images)

Why did the 1605 gunpowder plot fail? 9 big questions about the conspiracy to blow up parliament.

A scene from the Salem witch trials, depicted in a 19th-century lithograph. How two girls’ accusations of witchcraft escalated into one of the darkest episodes in early American history has long puzzled historians. (Image by Alamy)

When the devil stalked Salem: the story of the Salem witch trials

Salem: Investigating the Witch Trials HistoryExtra podcast series title card

Salem witch trialsEpisode 4: The pervasive power of puritanism.

Salem: Investigating the Witch Trials HistoryExtra podcast series title card

Salem witch trialsEpisode 3: A ‘new Jerusalem’ on the edge of a wilderness.

Salem: Investigating the Witch Trials HistoryExtra podcast series title card

Salem witch trialsEpisode 2: How events spiralled out of control.

Salem: Investigating the Witch Trials HistoryExtra podcast series title card

Salem witch trialsEpisode 1: introduction.

Jodie Comer plays Marguerite de Carrouges in the upcoming film 'The Last Duel',

The medieval women who spoke out against sexual violence

Women protest in London following the death of Sarah Everard, 2021

Walking a dangerous road: women's safety on the streets.

General Early Modern

The Bloody Code: your guide to the severe legal system

The death of Domitian: how aristocrats conspired against the Roman emperor.

Q&ADid the Scottish mass-murdering cannibal Sawney Bean actually exist?

A plane crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center

9/11: Twenty years on.

Prince Charles with his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten at Windsor

Why was Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s great-uncle, assassinated?

British police history: everything you wanted to know.

Chernobyl nuclear power plant a few weeks after the disaster

What was the Chernobyl Disaster?

James VI and I.

Was James VI and I murdered?.

Murder: a legal history.

Victorian London prison, Newgate. Prisoners in the exercise yard. Engraving by Gustave Doré, 1872 (Photo by Getty Images)

British prisons: everything you wanted to know.