Postwar state support for agriculture in the UK has been hailed a great success, but it had unexpected consequences. P rewar ...

As the medieval book trade declined, Oxford scribes had to turn their hands to other crafts to get by. A t its height ...

Rome welcomed and tended to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived in the 16th century, but its attitude to its own poor ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

On July 12th, 1698 five ships carrying 1,200 eager colonists left the Port of Leith in Scotland to a rapturous send-off. Most of the ill-fated emigrants did not know where they were going and did not ...

What makes a state? Is it its people, its borders, its government, or does it rest on recognition from international powers? Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the process by which states have been ...

On 20 June 1940, with the threat of large-scale enemy bombing looming ever closer and the Battle of Britain imminent, a letter from the Ministry of Home Security was sent to selected town clerks ...