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

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 ...

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 ...

Other satellite technologies have also revolutionised daily life. Weather satellites have made forecasts more accurate, while ...

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.

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.

The path leading from Edmond Halley’s writings on magnetism to UFOs under Brazil is as convoluted as you might expect. Nonetheless, it was Halley – best known for using Newtonian mechanics to predict ...

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 past is full of unfamiliar ideas and beliefs, but – as Evelyn Underhill has proven – some things are timeless. I n popular history, there are few more challenging subjects than the supernatural ...