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?

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Robert Peel was 62 when he died. He had sat in the Commons for more than 40 years and had held high office many times. As Home Secretary in 1829 he had created the ‘Peelers’ or ‘Bobbies’, the ...

In 1811 skilled textile workers in Britain attacked factories and factory owners to defend their livelihoods. By the time the Luddite cause hit Yorkshire in 1812, it had become a genuine mass movement ...

The organisers of the Indian displays at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 had a problem: they urgently required a taxidermy elephant. They needed the elephant as a frame on which to display a lavish ...