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.

Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War by Perry Anderson relitigates the causes of the conflict through some of their key proponents.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

On the strength of a military reputation, and by a show of military force, Napoleon achieved supreme power in France, and he maintained that supreme power with the goodwill of the army. When his ...