Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus by John Haywood and Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and ...

As so often in study of the past, continuing to ask the question matters more than agreeing upon an answer. Buildings made of ...

Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, as it pushed me to study the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the bottom up.

In 1941, down a narrow street in Rochdale was a small dark shop, visited by women with a very specific and urgent requirement. The proprietor was a ‘deep-bosomed’ lady in her sixties, overly made up ...

In the aftermath of the First World War, a quarter of a century before the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, Britain, France, and other Allied or Entente powers conducted a bold experiment in ...

Disputing Disaster is a book about the First World War’s origins and causes, not – as its title suggests – the war itself. It discusses six historians who have written on a century-old debate that has ...

The stroke of midnight that ushered in New Year’s Day 1961 tolled the funeral bell for the farthing. Originally a fourthling, or fourth part of a penny, Britain’s tiniest coin had a history stretching ...

Queen Victoria herself was asked to choose a capital for the province of Canada, which at that time consisted of the two colonies of Quebec and Ontario, and there’s a story that she simply stuck a ...

A brilliant inventor and engineer, William George Armstrong was also an armaments magnate, a considerate and generous man who manufactured killing machinery in large quantitities. Born in 1810, the ...

When Pope Alexander VI issued the Papal Bull of May 23rd, 1493, laying down a line of demarcation, to the east of which Portugal was granted exploring rights, while Spain had the same privilege to the ...