10 Downing Street, the residence of the prime minister of the United Kingdom. (Photo by Getty Images)

Politics

Male and female militia fighters on the march at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, July 1936. (Photo by Getty Images)

The Spanish Civil War: everything you wanted to know

The Parnethon, Athens

How to build a democracy (Athenian-style)

Fasil Ghebbi, a 17th-century fortress city in Gondar, Ethiopia. (Photo by Getty Images)

Peter Frankopan on global history in 2020

Brothers in arms Louis IX on his way to the Seventh Crusade, 1248. The French king kept his three brothers onside – preventing any potential family infighting – by providing them with huge lordships. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Medieval dynasties: how to stay on the throne

A contemporary painting shows Parisians seizing weapons from the Hôtel des Invalides on 14 July 1789, ahead of the storming of the Bastille later that day. Before revolution swept through Paris, peasants across the country were abolishing a whole social order from below.

The French Revolution: a tale of two revolutions

Black Lives Matter activists in Seattle, June 2020. “Accounts of the past have failed to properly address persecution,” says Peter Frankopan. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)

Interview: Peter Frankopan on the state of global history

Egyptian ships sunk at the entrance of the Suez Canal at Port Said

Your guide to...the Suez Crisis

The Suez canal

How significant was the Suez Crisis?

The battle of First Bar, 1841

Your guide to...the Opium Wars

The original ‘Big Three’ at Livadia Palace in Yalta: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. None of them came away from the summit with everything they had hoped for. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

Second World War

Your guide to...The Yalta and Potsdam conferences, 1945

A portrait of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, 1806. (Photo by IanDagnall Computing/Alamy Stock Photo)

The dark side of Alexander Hamilton

Phyllis Schlafly

The woman who opposed equality with men: Phyllis Schlafly and the real history behind Mrs. America

Huge sun setting over power lines and palm trees in California. (Photo by Getty Images)

California’s century of change

The birth pains of the NHS: how Britain's National Health Service was created

A girl, with her brother on her back, trudges past a stalled American tank, South Korea, June 1951. (Photo by Alamy)

How we forgot the Korean War

Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France meet (in marquee, top) at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, June 1520. “For all their expressions of friendship,” writes Glenn Richardson, “the two kings spent most of the summit attempting to outshine one another”. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Fields of the Cloth of Gold: the greatest show on earth

A mushroom cloud produced by the explosion of a hydrogen bomb during Operation Ivy, an American nuclear test that took place in 1952. (SSPL/Getty Images)

How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world

English admiral Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596), circa 1585. (Photo by Getty Images)

Francis Drake: slave trader

Britain and the slave trade

Abraham Lincoln (Photo by Library of Congress)

The secret plot to kill Lincoln

John Profumo in October 1962

Sex, lies and spies: the real history of the Profumo Affair

Photo of Queen Elizabeth II and members of the Privy Council

Your guide to...the Privy Council

Picture of Luddites destroying machinery

Industrial revolution

Your guide to…The Luddite movement

Harold Wilson in 1971, after his first period as prime minister. He would take power again in 1974. (Photo by Getty Images)

History heroJason Watkins chooses Harold Wilson (1916–95)

Irish people starving during the Potato Famine

The Corn Laws crisis

Harvest time in Surrey in the mid-19th century. Powerful Tory landowners had agitated for the introduction of the Corn Laws to protect the income from their farms. (Photo by Christie's Images via Bridgman)

The Corn Law crisis: the bitter political war that threatened thousands with starvation

Traditional Kente cloth from Ghana (Photo by Dreamstime)

A new view of Africa’s past

Ramsay MacDonald, the first British Labour prime minister, pictured after the general election of 1931

A brief history of the Labour Party

Two American soldiers wait for the second wave of combat helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry Division during Operation Pershing during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War defined America in the second half of the 20th century. (Photo by Patrick Christain/Getty Images)

Your guide to the Vietnam War – plus 7 surprising facts you might not know

How William Shakespeare shaped America