As so often in study of the past, continuing to ask the question matters more than agreeing upon an answer. Buildings made of ...

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

Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War by Perry Anderson relitigates the causes of the conflict through some of their key proponents.

In 1941, down a narrow street in Rochdale was a small dark shop, visited by women with a very specific and urgent requirement. The proprietor was a ‘deep-bosomed’ lady in her sixties, overly made up ...

It was the Gadsden Purchase that settled the main boundaries of the United States of America (though Alaska was added in 1867). The Louisiana Purchase of fifty years earlier, the biggest land sale in ...

In the aftermath of the First World War, a quarter of a century before the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, Britain, France, and other Allied or Entente powers conducted a bold experiment in ...

Queen Victoria herself was asked to choose a capital for the province of Canada, which at that time consisted of the two colonies of Quebec and Ontario, and there’s a story that she simply stuck a ...

The stroke of midnight that ushered in New Year’s Day 1961 tolled the funeral bell for the farthing. Originally a fourthling, or fourth part of a penny, Britain’s tiniest coin had a history stretching ...

The rules for young officers at West Point Military Academy in New York were strict. Alcohol possession could lead to expulsion and even smoking tobacco could affect one’s chances of graduating. Of ...