Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

Cricket as a colonial weapon.

Daniel Lambert in a 19th-century painting

Super-sized Georgians: why satirists were fixated with fatness.

Clare Jackson“England was seen as a pariah state, ruled by regicidal rebels who’d publicly executed their king”.

Living through the fall of communism.

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 1: introduction.

Ghosts, necromancy & the underworld in ancient Mesopotamia.

3 curious medieval ghost stories.

Windows on to history.

Windows: an illuminating history.

Bulldog burners and dungboys: classifying occupations in British censuses (1841-1911).

How a ballerina survived the Gulag.

How did pasta come to Europe and when did it first become established in Italy?

Egyptian pharaohs: everything you wanted to know.

How dogs shaped city life.

7 weird and wonderful Georgian beauty treatments.

(Illustration: Clair Rossiter for BBC History Magazine)

Beans, ale & 'windy meats': surprising 17th-century aphrodisiacs.

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

“A spotlight on historic societal misogyny and disbelief of women”: what The Last Duel gets right and wrong

Supernatural stories: 9 unusual British folktales.

A scene from the German film 'Ways to Strength and Beauty', 1925. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)

Second World War

Germany’s naked truth: the 19th-century nudism movements co-opted by the Nazis

Asia’s anti-imperial revolutionaries.

Tourists at Stonehenge. We have no better idea today than 200 years ago what the people who erected these sarsens truly believed. (Getty Images)

Prehistoric religion: a pagan riddle we will never solve?.

Suffragettes photographed in a dispute with the police

Jujitsu suffragettes: how women fought for the vote with an ancient martial art.

A family history of France.

Illustration of the Red Dragon of China

Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower?

Apartheid: everything you wanted to know.

An illustration from The Travels of Marco Polo, showing a teenage Marco on the deck of a ship sailing away from Venice

Why are Marco Polo's travels so famous?

Trial by combat: the real history behind The Last Duel.

A West Indian immigrant in 1960s Britain: A real lonely Londoner.

A 14th-century illustration shows two bishops watching men fight to the death in a trial by combat.

Medieval trial by combat: the real history behind The Last Duel