The siege of Mafeking lasted seven months from October 1899, when the little town was surrounded by a Boer force of some 5,000 men under a redoubtable leader, Piet Cronje. The British garrison ...

Wives for the settlers at Jamestown by William Ludwell Sheppard, 1876. New York Public Library. Public Domain.

In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, Sam Wetherell discovers a city of slavery, ships, soccer, and socialism, whose fortunes rose and fell with the tide. Liverpool, we often hear, is a city apart ...

Vladislav Zubok is Professor of International History at LSE. His latest book is The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 ...

How did medieval holy men cope with the strictures their devotion placed upon them?

Arsenic was a hidden killer in Victorian homes, but it also played a large part in the British economy. Which comes first: ...

I n May 1720 an infected ship from the Levant arrived in Marseilles, bringing with it the last major epidemic of bubonic ...

Writing from the safety of exile in eastern Tennessee, in the late 1850s the fiery Irish nationalist John Mitchel published a series of articles in his proslavery newspaper the Southern Citizen. In ...

Henry IV ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399. As opening lines for a history go, this is an excellent one. Its author was the teenage Jane Austen, in a lively ...

For one terrifying moment it seemed that history was repeating itself. In early 1881 the Russian tsar Alexander II had been assassinated. And now, a decade later on 11 May 1891, an assassin brought a ...