Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

An oil painting by John Cleveley The Elder depicting the Royal Naval Dockyard

The quest for longitude: the men who mapped the surface of the earth.

7 Victorian jokes have been given a modern twist - and they're hilarious

10 amazing Punch magazine sketches from 1859 to 1981

How did it become a gesture of well-wishing to say to an actor before they go on stage "break a leg"? (Photo by Andrys Lukowski via iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Q&AWhy do we say ‘Break a leg’?

The Stygian Lake in the Fifth Circle of Hell from from Dante’s epic poem 'The Inferno'. The phrase "Paint the town red" may originate from the sentence in the poem "we are they who painted the world scarlet with sins". (Photo by Getty Images)

Q&AWhy do we say ‘Paint the town red’?

The decline of the pub: what can we learn from history?

English gardens and Latin American football.

Revealed: the secrets of the Tudor cross-dressers

Incent's House as it stands today on the Berkhamsted High Street. (Creative Commons)

The hunt for the Tudor hitman.

A nurse on the French Eastern border treats a wounded soldier during the First World War. (Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Pain through the prism of war.

A mosaic depicting the poet Virgil writing the Aeneid. (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

How to succeed in Ancient Rome.

BBC History Magazine

Chloroform, Jean Harlow and the Marquess of Dorset: 3 things that happened On This Day 7 June

Wolfson History Prize special.

Victorian burials and the history of psychology.

Photo of cat in cat flap

Q&AHow old is the cat flap?

Alfred Hitchcock greets a crowd

10 facts about… Alfred Hitchcock

An illustration from the first edition of John Foxe The Book of Martyrs. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The LibraryElizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics

Portrait of Miranda Kaufmann. (Image by Jeni Nott)

History explorer: Africans in Tudor and Stuart Britain.

American actor and singer Howard Keel records 'Kiss Me Kate' with his co-star Patricia Morrison, 1964. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The growing pains of BBC Two.

Living in the shadow of the workhouse.

An Egyptian mummy receiving a CT scan

Looking inside ancient Egyptian mummies

Britain in the 1970s.

A view of Þingvellir National Park in western Iceland. It was here, in AD 930, that Viking settlers established the first pan-Icelandic assembly – possibly the oldest parliamentary body in the world. (© Dreamstime)

Vikings: A land without kings.

Ye olde travel guide: Amsterdam, 1648.

Portrait of Juliet Gardiner for BBC History Magazine

History explorer: the Second World War home front.

Cold War spies and friendship through the ages.

BBC History Magazine

In pictures: Great British Drawings

(Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

A brief history of home ownership in Britain

1,138: The number of London children recorded as dying of “teeth” in 1685. (Illustration: James Albon for BBC History Magazine)

History’s most surprising statistics.

“Being in a prison camp was better than going to a British boarding school”: child hostage of Japanese in WW2 reflects on his experience.