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 ...

Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning ...

Kashmir, a small valley in the Himalayas, plays an outsized role in the national imaginations of both India and Pakistan. Formed by the river Jhelum and its tributaries, and measuring a mere 89 by 25 ...

On 27 November 1776 a case came before Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, in which, the Morning Chronicle reported, proceedings were repeatedly interrupted by the ‘loud and ...

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 ...

The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 forced the Japanese government into unconditional surrender and the country, which was in a state of collapse, was occupied by ...

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin, who called him ‘my Himmler’. Involved in revolutionary activities from his teens and head of the secret police in Georgia in his twenties, he ...

The war between the States ended in 1865 with the North victorious and the Confederate South defeated. Slavery in the South was now illegal, the former slaves had the vote and groups of white ...

The ‘puffing devil’ or ‘Captain Dick’s puffer’, the first passenger-carrying vehicle powered by steam, made its debut on a road outside Redruth in Cornwall on the nineteenth century’s first Christmas ...