What makes someone a king? More importantly, what unmakes a king? Henry II’s experiment in co-kingship saw one Henry III fall ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della ...

The concerns of daily life prompted early modern people to seek reassurance in fate, stars, and astrologers.

Oceans inspire humans to ask big questions: what’s on the other side of the water? How can we cross it? What can we recover about those who have gone and failed to return? Two new books address these ...

We were overjoyed, this past summer, when our handkerchief tree, Davidia involucrata, flowered for the first time at the age of 17. Equally full of joy must have been the first European to have seen ...

As an undergraduate in the 1980s, my ‘Modern History’ BA commenced with the Romans’ departure from Britain in the early fifth century. The syllabus was even then a mummified relic of a mindset which ...

Why are you a historian of the Atlantic World? The Atlantic World is so vast and diverse; I’ll never run out of places and peoples to study. Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, as it ...

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 ...

The East African groundnuts scheme was postwar Britain’s equivalent of the Millennium Dome. In pursuit of a laudable objective, millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was poured diligently into a sump ...

Defeated in the First World War, humiliated, desperately short of food and assailed by the influenza epidemic that swept Europe, Germany was in a critical state. The Kaiser abdicated as emperor and on ...

Long before Louis Braille’s time, attempts had been made to create embossed letters or shapes on wood or paper to enable the blind to read by touch. After the Napoleonic Wars, a French artillery ...