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

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 Renaissance came later to Prague than to Venice, Flanders, or Rome. But it was no less transformative when it did. In the 16th century Prague became a place where empires converged and cultures ...

For much of the 20th century, young working-class women in England found out about procreation the ‘hard way’ or the ‘dirty way’.

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 ...

On Monday 25 May 1840, on a remote island 870 miles east of the Australian colony of New South Wales, 1,800 convicts celebrated the birthday of Queen Victoria. The party had been organised by the ...

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us that when it comes to sexuality and gender, scripture is often contradictory.