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 ...

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

The Japanese drive to become a great power required the domination of China. They defeated the Chinese in war in the 1890s and took away Korea. They soon infiltrated Manchuria, which had rich reserves ...

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 ...

The week-long hurricane that struck the south of England and the English Channel on November 24th, 1703, was beyond anything in living memory. The week-long hurricane that struck the south of England ...

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 ...