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

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 ...

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

Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire by Sarah E. Bond assembles a case for the power of the worker in ...

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 ...

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

In 1861 serfdom, the system which tied the Russian peasants irrevocably to their landlords, was abolished at the Tsar’s imperial command. Four years later, slavery in the USA was similarly declared ...

Mary Stocks, scholar, political activist, writer and journalist, published a play in 1933, provocatively titled Hail Nero! A Reinterpretation of History in Three Acts. It presents the notorious ...

I n the winter of 1471, the municipal council of Nördlingen in southern Germany got word of a scandal in the town’s public brothel. It prompted a criminal investigation into the conduct of the brothel ...

Wandering around the National Gallery recently, I was surprised by a wolf. Not a real wolf, but a painting of one – Sassetta’s The Wolf of Gubbio (1437-44).Originally part of a much larger altarpiece, ...

If you haven’t yet read the History Today Books of the Year Part 1, you can find it here. ‘His brilliance, compassion and sharp humour lives on inside it’ Karma Nabulsi is Senior Research Fellow at St ...