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Victoria, Albert and their children admire the royal Christmas tree

ExploreThe history of Christmas

Postcards from the past competition: the winners

Illustration for BBC History Magazine.

How potatoes conquered the world

US President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference. (Photo by Michael Reynolds/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Donald Trump: a president without precedent?

Floral tributes to Diana, Princess of Wales, outside Kensington Palace. (Photo by Liba Taylor/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Princess Diana's death: when grief gripped a nation

The then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump taking part in the final presidential debate at the Thomas & Mack Center on the campus of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, 19 October 2016. Trump repeatedly claimed that the election was “rigged” against him. (Photo by Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty Images)

A brief history of election “rigging” in the United States

Afrikaners with a Nordenfeld-Maxim field gun at Mafeking during the Second Boer War, 1900. (Photo by Getty Images)

Authors in the Boer War. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Documents that changed the world. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Dr Michael Mosley holds up a tapeworm

Tapeworms, arsenic and magic soap: fact-checking history’s weirdest fad diets and weight-loss gimmicks

Fasil Ghebbi, a 17th-century fortress city in Gondar, Ethiopia. (Photo by Getty Images)

Peter Frankopan on global history in 2020. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Summer reads 2020: the best history books to take on holiday (or staycation)

Black Lives Matter activists in Seattle, June 2020. “Accounts of the past have failed to properly address persecution,” says Peter Frankopan. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)

Interview: Peter Frankopan on the state of global history. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The Suez canal

How significant was the Suez Crisis?

The Kray brothers

The A-Z of British gangs and gangsters

American abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass, c 1866. (Photo by Shutterstock)

African American abolitionists in Britain. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The battle of First Bar, 1841

Your guide to...the Opium Wars

A stone believed to have magical properties, including the ability to summon rain, from Laraibina village in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. (Photo by Getty Images)

A history of magic. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The original ‘Big Three’ at Livadia Palace in Yalta: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. None of them came away from the summit with everything they had hoped for. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

Second World War

Your guide to...The Yalta and Potsdam conferences, 1945

York Minster's rose window features 16th-century Tudor Roses white on red (left) and Lancastrian Roses, red

A brief history of the English rose

Paul Stephenson and Guy Bailey

The great British civil rights scandal: the Bristol bus boycott

'Tippoo's Tiger', made for Tipu Sultan. (Photo by Alamy)

Museums and colonialism. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Huge sun setting over power lines and palm trees in California. (Photo by Getty Images)

California’s century of change. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The bikini was showcased to the world for the first time in July 1946. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

8 historical events that happened in July

Who’s holding the baby? How working mothers navigated the 20th century

Japanese school girls wear protective masks to guard against the influenza outbreak, February 1920. (Photo by Getty Images)

A history of pandemics: from Spanish Flu to Covid-19. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Mel Gibson in a scene from the film 'Braveheart'

Good drama, bad history: 11 historically inaccurate films you need to watch

Postcards from the past: a selection of entries from our lockdown competition

Pyongyang wreckage, Korean War

The Korean War “created a blood debt that is crucial to understanding North Korean behaviour ever since”

This photo dated 1948 shows the devastated city of Hiroshima some three years after the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city on 6 August 1945, at the end of World War 2. Around 140,000 people, or more than half of Hiroshima's population at the time, died in the first atomic bombing – with another 70,000 people perishing in the bomb dropped over Nagasaki 9 August 1945. (Photo credit should read AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

In pictures: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A mushroom cloud produced by the explosion of a hydrogen bomb during Operation Ivy, an American nuclear test that took place in 1952. (SSPL/Getty Images)

How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world