Hertha Ayrton’s experiment in a bathtub may have saved lives in the trenches, but it caused ripples among the ranks of the ...

Early 17th-century machines were intricate, impressive, responsive, and lively in equal measure. Even so, for Descartes just ...

How did a Gulf backwater become a global powerbroker? Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Commins explores the uneasy ...

In Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England Hillary Taylor listens in the archives for the voices of ordinary ...

Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some controversy.

How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident.

‘I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer’: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column by Mary Beth ...

The tour that the Quapaws gave French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in 1673. English, Spanish, French, and a ...

Ruth Ellis was a London bar hostess and call girl, from Rhyl in North Wales originally, who took up with an ex-public schoolboy called David Blakely, a motor-racing enthusiast and, like her, a heavy ...

The party was born of hostility to slavery. Back in 1820, the US Congress had agreed the Missouri Compromise, under which Missouri entered the Union as a slave state, but slavery was forbidden ...

Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, was riding high. In a series of brilliant victories from Austerlitz to Jena and Friedland he had defeated the armies of Austria, Prussia and Russia ...

In the late 18th century the island of Java was rocked by the waves of a political tsunami emanating from Europe. As the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars – together constituting the ...