On 10 December 1948, after months of negotiation led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ...

The remarkable fall of absinthe: from 19th-century ‘Green Fairy’ to scourge of society.

The mystery of what happened to the Marie Celeste gripped me as a child. It’s nice to have some mysteries in life though. Lucy Noakes is Rab Butler Chair in Modern History at the University of Essex ...

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 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 ...

The last time anyone saw Arthur Cravan alive, he was sailing off, alone, into the Pacific Ocean on a leaky boat. The nephew of Oscar Wilde, he was a poet, a boxer, a fraudster, a draft-dodger – and, ...

Prince Louis Napoleon was forty when he won the election for the French Presidency in 1848, a small, reserved, enigmatic man with chestnut hair, brown beard and a pointed moustache. Polling well over ...

Alfred Nobel’s death at the age of sixty-three in the Italian resort of San Remo, far from his native Sweden, was an appropriate reflection of the international but somewhat rootless nature of his ...

The murder of the Chief Secretary for Ireland and the Under-Secretary which took place on the evening of May 6th, 1882, in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, shocked our Victorian ancestors in a way that the ...