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

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

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

Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David ...

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

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

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

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 ...

Were there strikes in the ancient world? The term, as Sarah Bond explains in this boundary-crossing new book, derives from a notorious act of resistance in April 1768 when British sailors lowered (or ...

‘The risks are acute when we turn to traditional periodisations’ Levi Roach is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter There can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in ...

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 ...

Why are you a historian of the Caribbean? I was born and grew up in the West Country where the presence of the Caribbean past and Caribbean people was everywhere. What’s the most important lesson ...