Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

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

A medieval miniature depicts a monk and a woman in a bed.

Sex in the Middle Ages: have attitudes really changed?

A woodcut showing the interior of a kitchen in Elizabethan England. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Hold your noses: the smells, sounds and sights of Elizabethan England.

A 12-year-old boy with a large bruise on his face ‘pulls threads’ in a New York sweatshop

The 19th-century slums of New York

Unexpected Edwardians.

An allegorical depiction of the plague in ancient Rome, an angel batters down a door while people lie sick on the ground

The reign of Roman disease: why did disease hit a flourishing empire?.

A mosaic that shows two Roman women exercising, one holds a flower and another holds a leaf

7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Roman women

Tony Robinson as Private Baldrick and Rowan Atkinson as Captain Blackadder

Q&AWas there a real Blackadder?.

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

The medieval women who spoke out against sexual violence

An illustration of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865

Jamaica's Morant Bay Rebellion: brutality and outrage in the British empire

The burgundy cover of a British passport

Q&AWhen were passports as we know them today first introduced?

QuizHow Much Do You Know About Ancient Greece?.

This red-figure pottery depicts a story involving Helen of Troy. Greek tragedies posed their audiences an awkward question: what would you do if you were in a similar situation? Meanwhile, comedy gave satirists a channel through which to cut Athens' political heavies down to size. (DEA/G.NIMATALLAH/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Ancient Greek theatre and the Athenian identity.

Adolf Hitler stands with his back to a statue of Discobolos, the Discus Thrower

The classics and racial hatred: how the far right hijacked the ancient world.

A modern illustration shows prisoners of war being sold into slavery

Slavery in ancient Greece: what was life like for enslaved people?

An ancient Greek vase depicting sexual intercourse

A brief history of sex and sexuality in Ancient Greece

An ancient Greek vase depicts animal sacrifice of a cow by two women

Your guide to Ancient Greece: everything you wanted to know

Vanguard-class submarine HMS Vigilant, the top above water

Britain’s nuclear deterrent: a brief history.

Photo of a man on a penny-farthing

Q&AHow dangerous was the penny-farthing?