Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

Women in traditional Welsh dress, c1896. (Past Pix/SSPL/Getty Images)

Wales: In search of a history.

What did Magna Carta mean to the English in 1215?.

How is the image of revolutionary Che Guevara commodified? Alex von Tunzelmann explores. (Photo by Francois ANCELLET/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Che Guevara: face of the revolution.

Richard II sails down the Thames to Greenwich to meet the rebels. (Photo by Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo)

Why did the peasants really revolt?.

John Hardyng: Henry V’s secret agent.

TravelExplore Nashville, Tennessee: the beating heart of the American south.

Anna WhitelockConfronting slavery’s legacy.

The acclaimed English author Charles Dickens. (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)

7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Charles Dickens and his family home.

10 photographs that made history

A painting depicts a 14th-century sea battle

Medieval inspiration: what the fantasy genre owes to the 14th century.

Panorama of Machu Picchu

The last days of the Incas.

MK Ultra: the secrets of the CIA's mind-control programme.

Live Aid stage at Wembley, London, in 1985

When Live Aid rocked the world.

Between 1613 and 1754, a legal loophole meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’. (Photo by Getty Images)

General History

10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London

A 19th-century painted glass rolling pin and wooden pastry jigger. (Photo ©Emma Kay)

Biscuit tins and pastry jiggers: the history of 6 baking tools.

Jacob Rees-Mogg. (Photo by Getty Images)

Jacob Rees-Mogg on the Victorians.

Men enjoying a drink and a chat in a coffee house, 1674. Coffee houses became known as ‘schools of the wise’, where people would gossip, argue and discuss the breaking news of the day. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A drink for the devil: 8 facts about the history of coffee

Peasants in the Middle Ages at a cattle market. Cows appear to have been difficult to manage in the medieval period, and caused several deaths. (Photo by INTERFOTO /Alamy)

5 strange causes of death in the medieval period.

A group of household servants photographed in Northumberland, c1860–80. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

What was life like as a 19th-century servant?

In his native Como, Pliny the Younger's fame is reflected in his statue on the city cathedral's imposing west front, which was built in the 15th century. (Image by AKG Images)

Pliny's Rome: Vesuvius, vice and vestal virgins.

A portrait of Fridtjof Nansen, taken after his daring expedition across Greenland. (Image by Alamy)

My history heroPaul Rose chooses Fridtjof Nansen

A 1954 illustration of a woman wearing nylons. Lightweight, easy to conceal and fiercely sought after, stockings were a favourite with smugglers. (Photo by Bridgeman)

Nylon pirates: the postwar craze for cut-price stockings.

Historian and geographer Jared Diamond

Books interview with Jared Diamond: “With countries, as with people, crises attract attention”.

Jared Diamond (Photo by Jochen Braun)

Jared Diamond on countries in crisis.

Great Pyramid of Giza. Egypt. (Photo by Olgakostenko | Dreamstime.com)

10 of the most surprising numbers in history.

Members of Preston Ladies' Football Club (formerly Dick, Kerr’s Ladies) pose while carrying out leg exercises during practice, March 1937. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

1921: the year when football banned women.

Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring on the balcony of the Reichs Chancellery, Berlin. One British journalist recalled how, in 1933, Göring began an attack against the foreign press unlike any he had previously witnessed. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Reporting on Hitler: how foreign correspondents in Nazi Germany battled to expose the truth.

Paul Morland (Photo by Fran Monks)

How population has shaped world history.

Portrait of theologian and Bible translator John Wycliffe (c1330–84). (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

The murderous history of Bible translations

The pirate Blackbeard

10 brilliant beards from history