Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

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.

German astronomer Johannes Kepler c1620. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

The astronomer and the witch: Johannes Kepler’s fight to save his mother from execution

Student life and working class culture.

Monopoly maps: the history of MI9’s secret Second World War escape programme.

Shakespeare: the historians’ view.

A portrait of Catherine Howard. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Catherine Howard: The death of innocence.

A portrait of Queen Elizabeth I painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

How Shakespeare rewrote history.

A giant leap for mankind: William Harvey reveals the circulation of the blood

The Dissolution and a forgotten colony.

An illustration from an 11th-century manuscript depicting a king and his minister doing justice, c1050. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Medieval English law in the time of Magna Carta.

Democracy and an age of genius.

The Franciscans treating victims of the plague, miniature from La Franceschina, c1474, codex by Jacopo Oddi. Perugia, Biblioteca Capitolare (Library). (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

The hospital experience in medieval England

View of an Ancient Eyptian burial chamber

Q&AWhen was the first strike?.

A portrait of Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty which ruled over much of India from 1526 to 1858. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

How people make the past.

(Photo By DEA/G DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

The Tudor sex guide

An illustration of Edmund Spenser’s poetic work ‘The Shepheardes Calender’. (Photo by Culture Club/Contributor/Getty Images)

The dark side of Elizabethan England

Muslims and Jews in the 16th century.

A brave new world: the 1980s home computer boom

An illustration of Victoria Woodhull addressing a congressional committee on the benefits of women's suffrage, 1871. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

The LibraryThe one-woman revolution.

Roman women on a fresco from Pompeii

Q&ACould women in Ancient Rome hold any power?.

16th century engraving depicting a man with leprosy

Q&AHow did doctors treat leprosy?

The Beatles perform onstage at the Cavern Club, Liverpool in February 1961. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

History explorer: the swinging sixties.

How has public memory of the Holocaust changed over the years?.

A brief history of camouflage

5 hidden killers of the Victorian home.

Black American civil rights leader Martin Luther King (1929 - 1968) addresses crowds during the March On Washington at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, where he gave his 'I Have A Dream' speech. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)

Is Martin Luther King's ‘I have a dream’ the greatest speech in history?.

Postwar Germany and medieval CSI.

Chess, gambling and cards: Tudor games and indoor pastimes.

The history of middle-class wine drinking

19th-century boxer Larry Foley

Q&AWhy do we say ‘happy as Larry’?