How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. I n March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of ...

I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly ...

On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I n the 30 ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

Italy’s entry into the Great War in 1915 prompted 300,000 men to return to their homeland to join the fight. Were they Italian enough for Italy?

T here can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in British history. Whether the subject be Georgian architecture, Victorian literature, or Tudor religious culture, we find ourselves ...

How did Western Europe learn of the fall of Constantinople, the loss of Negroponte, and the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto? In the ...

Greg Grandin has dedicated his career to the study of how United States imperialism shaped Latin America and how its Latin American empire shaped the United States. America, América may be his most ...

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels finds that the son of God is more than the sum of his parts. In the New Testament, Jesus is a charismatic miracle healer. He ...

The Earth was created in seven days. On which day were the dinosaurs made? Discoveries in geology and palaeontology forced Victorian creationists to be especially creative. When Samuel Pepys’ diary ...

It was the greatest contest in the history of art – and arguably the most mysterious too. The year was 1401 and in Florence, the ‘home’ of the Renaissance, uncertainty reigned. Still reeling from an ...

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley follows in the footsteps of those who fled fascism. Perhaps you’ve heard the stories ...