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General Modern

A Grand National Union Banner depicting president Abraham Lincoln and his running mate Andrew Johnson

Lincoln: The vote that saved America

Cover of the Voyages Extraordinaires series by the French science fiction writer Jules Verne.

The phantom menace: 10 milestones in science fiction

Malcolm X chats with Eric Abrahams – the Oxford Union president who vowed to “fill the room with blacks” – before giving his famous address on 3 December 1964. (Getty)

Malcolm X in Oxford: Black power amid dreaming spires

Picture depicting the Dogger Bank Incident

Q&AWhat was the 'North Sea Outrage'?

Picture of a hand holding a candle

Q&AWhy do we say ‘can’t hold a candle to…’?

A brief history of tattoos

Morris dancers perform

Steps in time: Dancing through history

10 weird and wonderful historical newspaper stories

A portrait of Ian Lancaster Fleming, the creator of the character James Bond

The spy who loved Jamaica

The historians’ take on… the future of Iraq

10 astronomers you’ve (probably) never heard of

A still from the set of 'Westward the Women', directed by William A Wellman. (Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

How the Wild West was spun

Crowds in Coronation Park, Delhi, celebrate the coronation of King George V in 1911. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The LibraryDid Britain make the modern world?

How did it become a gesture of well-wishing to say to an actor before they go on stage "break a leg"? (Photo by Andrys Lukowski via iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Q&AWhy do we say ‘Break a leg’?

The decline of the pub: what can we learn from history?

Destroyer escorts fire depth charges against submarine raiders in the Atlantic during the Second World War. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

What the modern navy did for us

A nurse on the French Eastern border treats a wounded soldier during the First World War. (Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Pain through the prism of war

A coal mine explosion, the birth of Nancy Witcher Langhorne, and the first Briton in space: 5 things that happened On This Day 19 May

Alfred Hitchcock greets a crowd

10 facts about… Alfred Hitchcock

American actor and singer Howard Keel records 'Kiss Me Kate' with his co-star Patricia Morrison, 1964. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The growing pains of BBC Two. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

A scene from the 1963 film 'Naked Among Wolves', depicting a Nazi concentration camp

The long shadow of Adolf Hitler

Britain in the 1970s. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy’s The Apocryphal Napoleon imagined what would have happened if the emperor had conquered Russia in 1812 instead of being defeated at Moscow. In this painting, Napoleon retreats from Moscow. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The history essay: the past that never was

A group of survivors from the Long March after their arrival in Shenxi in 1934. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

The LibraryMao: the legend of the Long March

(Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

A brief history of home ownership in Britain

Worshippers inside the Duke Street Baptist Church in Richmond, Surrey, listening to a service in 1954. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images)

The LibraryD-Day for God?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Larry Siedentrop photographed for BBC History Magazine. (Image by Geraint Lewis)

Books interview with Larry Siedentop: "What is distinctive about the west is that the organising social role is no longer the patriarchal family and instead the individual". This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The front cover of a 1924 edition of Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'

Beyond the Hitler diaries

Can Britain make nuclear power work this time around?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Great Train Robbery’s Ronnie Biggs dies