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

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 leading pioneer in the creation of television, John Logie Baird, was a Scotsman, born in 1888, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and educated in Glasgow. An electrical engineer and an eccentric ...

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 ...

In the late autumn of 1901 a woman named Laura Masall set off alone into the rocky grasslands of central Oklahoma to hunt for rattlesnakes. Contemporary newspapers painted Masall as one of the most ...