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.

Richard, Duke of York was one of the barons who competed to run England during the reign of the hopelessly inadequate Henry VI. With a better claim to the crown by strict primogeniture than Henry ...

The composer of the Daphnis and Chloe ballet, the ever-popular Bolero, the Pavane for a Dead Infanta and a piano concerto for the left hand among many admired works was 62 when he died. From his ...

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 ...

Port wine played the same role in Portugal that whisky did in Scotland, as a profitable export to England from a struggling economy. English merchants were already established in Lisbon and Oporto, ...

The first Christmas of the First World War has become something of a byword for truces in the trenches and the somewhat controversial subject of football. Yet Britain’s contribution to the war was not ...

The Chinese folk tale The Snail-Shell Girl tells the story of a poor man who falls in love with a beautiful woman who lives in a shell, their path to happiness thwarted by an evil landlord. Adapted ...

In the racially segregated American South of the 1950s a Black woman sits in the section of a bus reserved for white passengers. Physically and verbally abused by the driver, she is forced off the ...