Social history

Christmas merriment in an old English manor in the 1500s. (Photo by North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy)

How to host a medieval Christmas

History Advent Calendar 2019

Advent calendar 2019: 24 facts about Christmas through history

Tourists at Stonehenge

General prehistory

Stonehenge: a prehistoric tourist trap

The Cunard liner Lusitania

First World War

How did Britain react to the sinking of the Lusitania?

Three elderly men on a bench in London's Southall, circa 1980. (Photo by Getty Images)

Asians in 1980s Britain

The figure of Santa Claus is the very embodiment of the modern American secular Christmas. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)

How America captured Christmas

Tom Smith's Surprise Cosaques, Christmas Crackers 1878. (Image by Getty)

The history of Christmas crackers

A family at the seaside in the 1960s.

In pictures: English life in the 1960s, photographed by Tony Ray-Jones

The Varangian Guard, as shown in the 12th-century Madrid Skylitzes. Around this time, the guard, which protected the Byzantine emperor, was apparently dominated by English warriors who had fled the Norman conquest. (Image by Bridgeman)

A medieval new England: the Anglo-Saxons’ eastern odyssey

Lord Louis Mountbatten with his fiancee Edwina Ashley in 1922. (Photo by Getty Images)

The Mountbattens: success and scandal

A c1880 Christmas card shows a frog committing murder

Carrots, goblins and killer frogs: an unexpected history of Christmas

Oskar Schindler, who prevented hundreds of Jews from being murdered in the Holocaust

Second World War

My history hero Simon Reeve chooses Oskar Schindler (1908–74)

Few war leaders have been more profoundly steeped in history than Winston Churchill, who drew inspiration from his ancestor – and one of Britain's most celebrated generals – the Duke of Marlborough (left). (Images by Getty Images/Bridgeman

Second World War

Sending history into battle: the lessons that war leaders have tried to learn from the past

A statue of the Roman emperor Augustus in Augsburg, Germany

After the empire: the fall of Roman Britain

Rosa Parks rides an integrated bus

From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream