Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

The 1920s: Roaring or tame?.

Emil Zátopek. (Photo by Universal/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

The running revolutionary.

Singer Germaine Lubin in conversation with officer Hans Speidel at the German Embassy in Paris, 1941. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Les Parisiennes: how the women of Paris lived, loved and died in the 1940s.

The Cold War and the history of philosophy.

Forgotten science: 7 of the strangest scientific theories in history.

Photo of pencils

Q&AHow old is the pencil?

The history of... re-enacting battles

The history of the suntan

Mompesson House, which has sinister connections with a ghost known as the Demon Drummer. (Clare Hargreaves/The National Trust)

9 haunted historic houses

Paris’s women at war and the Housewives’ League.

Men line the rails around Radio City, on an abandoned naval fort in the Thames Estuary. In June 1966, Radio City was at the centre of a murder enquiry that would lead to the closure of Britain’s pirate radio stations. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

1966: when the swing turned sour.

British gunners busily engaged in putting over a curtain barrage. Somme campaign, France, 1916. (Photo by Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

The Somme soldiers’ stories.

Britain’s Second World War and the Country House.

‘Show me the money!’ A brief history of American spending power.

(Photo by illustration by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

EU referendum: how significant is Britain’s vote to leave? Historians debate.

The Radium Girls and the cotton revolution.

Was Sarah Guppy the real inventor of the Clifton Suspension Bridge?

The most popular historical figures you've (probably) never heard of

Wolfson History Prizes: Nazi camps and St Augustine.

A detail of the decorative carving on the side of the Oseberg cart c850 AD. A woman with streaming hair apparently restrains a man’s sword arm as he strikes at a horseman accompanied by a dog. Below is a frieze of intertwined serpentine beasts. (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Viking women: raiders, traders and settlers.

The battle of Jutland and 1950s domestic dangers.

A photograph of Queen Victoria c1887. (Alexander Bassano/Spencer Arnold/Getty Images)

General History

9 of history's best quotes

Illustration by Arthur Rackham to the play ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ by William Shakespeare. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

The fairy menace.

Kate Summerscale. (Photo by Fran Monks)

The wicked boy: the mystery of a Victorian child murderer.

A 1954 advertisement for Cooper's Y-Front. (Photo by Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A revealing history of underwear.

(BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd/Tiger Aspect/Robert Viglasky)

Peaky Blinders: behind the scenes with creator Steven Knight.

A combo picture of two images taken 13 August 2002 at Cairo Museum shows a foot of a mummy missing its big toe and beside it a prosthetic toe of leather and wood to replace the amputated real one. (Photo by Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images)

Q&AHow long have people used prosthetic limbs?.

The history of consumerism and Chinese philosophy.

Edmund II - better known as Edmund Ironside - shown in a 14th-century manuscript. (Photo by Wikimedia Commons)

Edmund Ironside: Anglo-Saxon warrior king

Swan Theatre, Bankside, London, interior from drawing by Johannes de Witt. The Shakespearian theatre, erected c1593 on Bankside – could hold 3,000 spectators – typical of the time. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

At the playhouse: watching Shakespeare's plays in Elizabethan England.