When Francisco Franco died in November 1975 the enduring image of the country he had ruled for almost four decades was of a ...

A routine Native American cattle round-up at the US-Mexico border in 1898 became an international incident.

Though his relics are reviled, his impact is more keenly felt than ever. Can The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by ...

In The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642 Jonathan Healey holds Juntos and ‘jittery times’ responsible for England’s ...

Depending on one’s vantage point, the meaning of the French Revolution varies. The First Republic succumbed to an imperial ...

The wine trade in medieval Tunis was lucrative, but it caused a moral quandary for the ruling Hafsids.

The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court by Breeze Barrington looks beyond the warming ...

An early modern ship’s surgeon had to treat not just broken bones but distress and trauma. I n September 1649 ship’s surgeon ...

Isaac Merritt Singer was no introverted back-room inventor, but one of the most forceful, flamboyant and unscrupulous tycoons in American business history. Though he did not invent the sewing machine, ...

The electric chair was invented by employees at Thomas Alva Edison's works at West Orange, New Jersey in the late 1880s. The inventor's involvement has embarrassed many of his biographers and an entry ...

John Hanning Speke, an army officer’s son from the West Country, was commissioned into the army of the East India Company in 1844 at the age of seventeen. In 1854 he eagerly joined an expedition to ...

On July 15th, 1815, after being defeated at Waterloo and deposed in Paris, the former Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte presented himself to Captain Frederick Maitland, commander of HMS Bellerophon, which ...