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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

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

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

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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

Women load up scrap metal at a major steelworks, 1942. During the Second World War, the government opened hundreds of nurseries to encourage women into work but, as Britain returned to peace, most closed. (Photo by Fred Ramage/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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

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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

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

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Two nannies stop for a chat while walking their charges in a London park, March 1916 (Photo by Getty Images)

Working mothers . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.