Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

A portrait of James Gordon Bennett, Jr (1841–1918), by Alexis Joseph Perignon, 1867. (Photo by The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)

Q&AWhy do we say ‘Gordon Bennett’?

5 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Dark Ages

"The idea that pharaohs were worshipped as all-powerful gods is just plain silly": John Romer on the truth about ancient Egypt.

Love, sex and marriage in ancient Egypt

View of Algiers with mediterranean galleys, published in Johannes van Keulen's Dutch Atlas, 1709. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

When Britons were slaves in Africa

6 strange newspaper stories that shocked Victorian Britain.

Roman ruins in Ancient Ostia with the tenements of Serapide

FeatureFive facts about Roman insulae

The big questions of the Holocaust.

Ada Nield Chew: England’s forgotten suffragist.

Festive QI facts: 8 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of Christmas

A Roman relief showing a market scene

A handbook to shopping in ancient Rome.

Two men carrying old woman as they migrate, following the Partition of India in 1947

10 historical turning points for modern India.

Young women working in a textile mill in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1943

Famine and freedom: how the Second World War ignited India.

Corner shops and Russian ballet.

General History

The big questionWhy did the west dominate history for so long?

Persuading the people: British propaganda in the Second World War.

What religion was practised by the people of Lithuania before their conversion to Christianity in the 14th century?.

General History

Q&AWhy are kissing gates so called and what is their significance as entrances to graveyards?

First World War

What is the origin of the phrase 'to blow smoke up someone's arse'?

Soviet science and feeding Britain at war.

BBC History Magazine

Who was the first ever teenage heartthrob?

Black British history and Charles I’s children.

Italian poet Francesco Petrarch

Q&AHow and when did the medieval period get its name?

Operation Gold Rush with Dan Snow

Reporting from war zones.

A London slum family stood in a street with all their possessions following eviction, c1901. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Life in 19th-century slums: Victorian London’s homes from hell

Roman silver denarius coins AD 72 till 200 and were offered up at the beginning of the 4th century AD, from the Nydan Bog archaeological site. (Photo by Clare Rowan)

From bes to Bitcoin: alternative currencies in the ancient Roman world.

Adrian Turner as Poldark. (Photo by BBC Pictures)

Poldark’s Cornwall: the history behind the hit series

The Aberfan disaster and women who made history.

A painting depicting the storming of the Tuileries. (Photo By DEA/G DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Socialite, spy, saviour: Grace Dalrymple Elliott.