From the printing press to the internet, the spread of information has changed the world. How do we recognise an age defined ...

In 1943 letters reporting starvation and death in Bengal began to reach Indian soldiers serving the British overseas. Despite ...

The final fraudulent Cottingley fairies photograph was taken on 21 August 1920 by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths.

The Victorian reading public had access to a vast array of classical literature from Asia in multiple translations by experts ...

A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular by Jonathan Sheehan places bloodletting at the heart of Western thought ...

The abolition of the death penalty is often seen as a symbol of the permissive 1960s. The end of capital punishment in Britain was instead the result of a long campaign by abolitionists. At 8am on 13 ...

On 4 August 1626 three ships dropped anchor in the road off the leeward coast of St Christopher (St Kitts) in the Caribbean. A hundred English settlers rowed ashore, come to make their fortunes in ...

For those governing Britain’s imperial possessions, sports were a site for what Headlam termed ‘moral training’, a key vehicle for the transmission of the social behaviours that the Raj sought to ...

A new translation marks the 50th anniversary of Carlo Ginzburg’s pioneering microhistory The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. In 1599 the poet Edmund Spenser died.

In The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear Ho-fung Hung watches the West swing from Sinophilia to Sinophobia and back again. The China Question argues that the Mongols’ brutal westward ...

During the First World War the pacifist Caroline Playne was horrified to see a passing train packed with: a couple of hundred de-humanised females, Amazonian beings bereft of reason or feeling, ...

In the late autumn of 1901 a woman named Laura Masall set off alone into the rocky grasslands of central Oklahoma to hunt for rattlesnakes. Contemporary newspapers painted Masall as one of the most ...