Postwar state support for agriculture in the UK has been hailed a great success, but it had unexpected consequences. P rewar Britain was dependent on imported food; in 1938, 70 per cent of the cash ...

As the medieval book trade declined, Oxford scribes had to turn their hands to other crafts to get by. A t its height Oxford’s book trade enjoyed the establishment of Dominican and Franciscan friaries ...

Rome welcomed and tended to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived in the 16th century, but its attitude to its own poor could be very different. A n unprecedented number of pilgrims travelled to ...

The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print.

The Heretic of Cacheu by Toby Green and Worlds of Unfreedom by Roquinaldo Ferreira, painstakingly recreate the worlds at the beginning and end of Portugal’s slave trade.

On 14 November 1848 the Fox sisters conjured up a movement when they made contact with the dead – or so they claimed.

Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster by Melanie Arndt discovers how civil society flourished – and then faltered – in the fallout.

In 1955 the rule on the buses in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, was that ‘coloured’ passengers must sit at the back and leave the front seats to white passengers. In December a Black woman in her ...

The sums are eye-watering. In 991 the English king Æthelred paid the Vikings £10,000 to stop them sacking the east coast of England. Three years later a sum variously recorded as £16,000 or £22,000 ...

Early in 1221 the army of the Fifth Crusade was encamped in the city of Damietta in northern Egypt. As it planned its next move, messengers began to arrive bearing wondrous news. An army was ...

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the ...

The year before Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, another writer, Olympe de Gouges, published a comparable call for equality during the turmoil of revolutionary France.