Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

This detail from the Gundestrup Cauldron – a richly decorated silver vessel thought to date from the second-century BC – depicts a Celtic god or druid surrounded by beasts. (Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

The genius of the Celts.

Great Train Robbery’s Ronnie Biggs dies

BBC History Magazine

Men from the Ministry: How Britain Saved its Heritage

BBC History Magazine

Harry Houdini escape artist props to go under hammer

History explorer: the catastrophe of the Black Death.

Ye Olde Travel Guide: Ballarat 1854.

Simon Thurley at Cromford Mills in Derbyshire. It was here, in 1771, that Richard Arkwright set up his first water-powered mills, "bringing people to a single place where they could be organised into an efficient workforce". (BBC History commissioned portrait by Mike Abrahams)

History Explorer: the rise of the factory.

Sport offered the two sides the perfect stage on which to get one over on the 'enemy', says Dominic Sandbrook. Pictured here is a queue for a football match between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The Cold War in your living room.

Victorian vigour and a remarkable family.

Self-portraits: How people took selfies in the past

Disability history

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One

A policeman feels the full force of a blast in this illustration – from the 7 June 1884 issue of 'The Illustrated Police News' – depicting a Fenian attack on Scotland Yard. The Fenians' dynamite campaign of the early 1880s provoked a radical response from the British government. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The Victorian war on terror.

BBC History Magazine

Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660-1715

The other Elizabethan England.

My history hero: Robert Baden Powell (1857–1941).

Ye olde travel guide: Caracas 1783.

American poet Ezra Pound, a major figure of the early modernist movement. (Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images)

The march of the Green Shirts.

Beaumaris Gaol, Anglesey, Wales. The prison could accommodate up to 30 inmates under the so-called 'silent system', in which inmates slept in separate cells at night but worked and attended chapels and classes together during the day. (Ashley Cooper via Getty Images)

History Explorer: 19th-century prison reform.

BBC History Magazine

Money: The Unauthorised Biography

Top 5 Jane Austen recipes.

BBC History Magazine

New website charts London's well-being across 125 years

Who's the best-dressed Briton in history?.

BBC History Magazine

“Forbear wine and tobacco”: advice for 17th-century university freshers revealed

"People in the Middle Ages coped better with death than we do"

Bright ideas

BBC History Magazine

'Britain needs police museum' says crime historian

Music used 'to torment victims of torture in Pinochet’s Chile'

Merchants and lower-ranking gentlemen often put pen to paper themselves, but wealthy men and gentlewomen were more likely to employ a scribe. (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

How to send a letter in medieval England.

BBC History Magazine

Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957–59