Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert looks beyond the cities to the coffee and cotton that fuelled a global market.

Chaucer’s meadows are romantic landscapes of leisurely frolicking. But for medieval haymakers July meant a month of hard ...

On 12 September 1919, the rubber-faced poet-aviator Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italian nationalism’s propagandist-in-chief, swooped into the port of Fiume (now Rijeka) on the Adriatic and claimed it for ...

Bede wrote that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded Britain en masse in the fifth century. Does the evidence agree?

In 480 BC a vast Persian army under king Xerxes crossed into Greece. The invasion was triggered by Athens’ defeat of a Persian army at Marathon ten years earlier, but this was a far bigger force and ...

On 1 July 1903 a publicity stunt for a sporting paper cycled into history as the first Tour de France. Cycle racing was all the rage. The Paris-Brest-Paris race was launched in 1891. (Its inaugural ...

It marked a turning point in the Cold War: the president of the United States had just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The US military’s top brass were furious, having ...

Robert Hole shows how important historical context is for an understanding of the most significant document in American history. Graham Noble explains why the issue of equal gender rights has been so ...

The treaty to bring parts of present-day Arizona and New Mexico into the United States was signed on December 30th, 1853. It was the Gadsden Purchase that settled the main boundaries of the United ...

On May 31st, 1902, the Peace of Vereeniging was signed, ending the Second Boer War between Britain and the two Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Second Boer War between ...