Social history

Scene depicting rural life in Stuart Britain. (via Getty Images)

Stuart Britain: what was life like for ordinary people?

Marble bust of Emperor Caligula. (DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

The 8 bloodiest Roman emperors in history

Podcast Website large Misha Glenny

The remarkable history of the Netherlands

London & North Western Railway locomotive, 1848. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

8 ways railway travel changed everything for Britain

Bearded Victorian man. (Photo by Getty Images)

A brief history of beards

Charles Lindbergh, photographed alongside the ‘Spirit of St. Louis’.

A pioneering flight: Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing

A Georgian painting depicting children leaving for school

The Georgian guide to perfect parenting

A portrait of Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale: nursing by numbers

From The Library

Four police officers, members of the Bow Street Horse Patrol, pose for a photograph with a horse.

The rise of the Great British ‘bobby’: a brief history of Britain’s police service

An archive photo of the Bevin Boys. The name was given to the conscripted workforce that provided Britain with coal during the Second World War. (Courtesy of Mining Art Gallery, Bishop Auckland)

Second World War

5 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Bevin Boys

A contemporary pictorial depiction of the Great Plague.

The Black Death: the historians’ view

From The Library

English countrywoman (right) with a lady of the court. From ‘Civitates Orbis Terrarum’, 1572. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Tudor women: what was life like?

A miniature from the Codex Justinianus

10 dangers of the medieval period

(Illustration for BBC History Magazine)

Michael Wood on… slavery