Toothbrushing has been a regular part of most people’s daily routines since the mid-20th century, but it was only a few decades earlier that the British state first began to impress upon the public ...

In the first of a new series, we ask historians one of the burning questions of the day.

Donald Trump has often been likened to Aaron Burr, described as ‘one of the most unprincipled men in the United States’. His isolationism, however, owes more to Thomas Jefferson.

Lost Countries of South America, Laurence Blair makes the case for the region. Blair, a British journalist living in Paraguay, tells the stories of nine South American ‘nations’ that either broke up, ...

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the ...

The world is small nowadays and the acclaim that once greeted those who had accomplished great journeys of exploration is now reserved for the voyagers in outer space. It was different in the ...

During the Cold War, 224 nuclear weapons were denotated at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union’s remote Arctic north. Only with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 did the true scale become known.

The British Motor Show of 1948 opened on October 27th at Earl’s Court and attracted more than half a million people. After the austerity and rationing of the war and postwar years - you could drive ...

The Levant Company, or Company of Turkey Merchants as it was also known, received its first charter in 1582 from Queen Elizabeth. The need for new markets for English cloth and anxiety about access to ...

In the late 70s AD Marcus Cerrinius Vatia ran for the lower magisterial office of aedile in the ancient city of Pompeii. More than 80 inscriptions, painted on the walls of the city’s buildings, record ...

The most famous English historian of his time was born, to his lasting satisfaction, on St Crispin’s Day - the anniversary of Henry V’s victory at Agincourt - at Rothley Temple, the country mansion of ...