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

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 ...

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

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

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The shocking murder of its royal family in June 2001 changed the course of Nepal’s history. On the massacre’s 25th anniversary, the country appears to be changing direction again. It is a quarter of a ...

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From neo-Nazis to unpopular politicians, since the Second World War many people have been accused of trying to establish a Fourth Reich, but what was it? Although Hitler’s Third Reich collapsed almost ...

The idea that a battle might alter the course of history, though first popularised in the 19th century, is not without foundation. For as one writer remarked a generation after 1066, ‘French customs ...

In the early 1800s harsh desert landscapes in North America’s West, including the Sonoran, Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Great Basin deserts, were considered a major obstacle by early advocates of US ...

In the chaos unleashed by the October Revolution, Mikhail Bulgakov found a past become fragmented and confused, and history the domain of madmen and devils. Mikhail Bulgakov wasn’t all that bothered ...

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