Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

Ruth Ellis and her friend Desmond Cussen

The true story of Ruth Ellis and the hanging that rocked a nation

Sexuality on trial in colonial America.

Mining history: everything you wanted to know.

The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation.

"I felt very alone in a world gone horribly mad": the experiences of evacuees in WW2.

A 20th-century painting shows John applying his seal to the 1215 charter

Henry III and the Magna Carta that mattered.

A c1300 depiction of a man paying taxes

Do you know the correct date of Magna Carta? Here’s why you might be wrong

Farmers standing in a field

Where does the term redneck come from?

An artist's impression of the scene on the track, hours after the Abergele Train Disaster, a carriage is on its side and smoke billows from the wreck

An inferno that claimed 33 lives: the story of a deadly Victorian disaster.

Lilian Lenton, collage by Rachel Dickens

Lilian Lenton, the 'Elusive Pimpernel': the courageous and daring suffragette who took direct action.

Was there a best time to be alive? The pitfalls of looking back for a nostalgic 'golden age'.

A man stands on a platform in front of a crowd

Second World War

Why Schindler’s List remains relevant decades on

A portrait of William 'Buffalo Bill' Cody standing in front of his saddle, holding a rifle behind his back.

13 famous cowboys and gunslingers from the history of the American Wild West

Annie Gray (Photo by Melissa Rodrigues)

“Leisure was built into the whole shopping experience” | Annie Gray on the history of the high street.

Week six quiz: Victorian life.

Victorian family life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture.

Living in sin: unmarried relationships in Victorian Britain.

How to celebrate a Victorian wedding.

American actress Charlotte Cushman and Matilda Hayes. (Image by Alamy)

How Georgian and Victorian same-sex couples co-opted marital traditions and made them their own.

How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse?

What working-class autobiographies can tell us about the Industrial Revolution.

A late 19th-century image shows a group of ‘pit lasses’, employed to work at the surface of coal mines. An earlier law had explicitly banned women from working below ground. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Industrial revolution

From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution

Nelson & Winnie: inside the Mandelas' marriage.

'Monster soup commonly called Thames water, being a correct representation of that precious stuff doled out to us!!!', 1828; showing an ugly woman holding a spy glass which touches the circumference of a large circle representing a magnified drop of water filled with grotesque aquatic creatures. A satire on the Metropolitan Water Supply.

From murder bottles to arsenic wallpaper: 5 hidden killers in Victorian Britain.

Victorian healthcare | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture.

The surgeon Robert Liston prepares to cut open a patient in the first half of the 19th century. Known as the “fastest knife in the west end”, Liston could remove a leg in less than 30 seconds. For most patients, however, the agony was more prolonged. (Wellcome Library, London)

An appointment at the house of death: the horror of the early Victorian hospital.

The surgeon Robert Liston prepares to cut open a patient in the first half of the 19th century. Known as the “fastest knife in the west end”, Liston could remove a leg in less than 30 seconds. For most patients, however, the agony was more prolonged. (Wellcome Library, London)

"An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain.

A mural in Bristol of activist Roy Hackett, one of the primary organisers of the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott (Photo by Steve Taylor ARPS/Alamy Stock Photo)

Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism”.

Members of the National Front speak to the press in 1978. Chairman John Tyndall (second from left) was a neo-Nazi who later founded the British National Party (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right.

William Dalrymple (Photo by David Hartley/Shutterstock)

“Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history.