Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, as it pushed me to study the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the bottom up.

The Renaissance came later to Prague than to Venice, Flanders, or Rome. But it was no less transformative when it did. In the 16th century Prague became a place where empires converged and cultures ...

For much of the 20th century, young working-class women in England found out about procreation the ‘hard way’ or the ‘dirty way’.

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle ...

Caught between the antagonistic states of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is stuck in geopolitical limbo. Its location – and its ...

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us that when it comes to sexuality and gender, scripture is often contradictory.

Absinthe, once the ‘Green Fairy’ – muse of painters and poets – came to haunt the last decades of 19th-century France. ‘Of all the alcoholic poisons that lead to crime, there is none more formidable ...

In the racially segregated American South of the 1950s a Black woman sits in the section of a bus reserved for white passengers. Physically and verbally abused by the driver, she is forced off the ...

The Chinese folk tale The Snail-Shell Girl tells the story of a poor man who falls in love with a beautiful woman who lives in a shell, their path to happiness thwarted by an evil landlord. Adapted ...

On 10 December 1948, after months of negotiation led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed by the UN General Assembly. At first, after Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband ...

The earliest representation of the turkey in Europe is ‘a turkey-cock in his pride proper’, requested by the Yorkshireman William Strickland when he applied for his family’s coat of arms in 1550. Can ...