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Ye olde travel guide: Aksum AD 537. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

George Frederick Handel married opera's passion with the respectability of biblical texts, says Tim Blanning. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

10 milestones in the history of western music

BBC History Magazine

The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine – Antiquarian, Architect and Visionary

A Mayan funeral mask, made from jadeite and shell

The Maya and the apocalypse

Ye olde travel guide: Philadelphia 1774. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries by Jacques-Louis David

Napoleon's great cultural charade

BBC History Magazine

Project uses 'crowd-sourcing' to decipher early handwriting

A ceiling fresco depicting Christ. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Christianity under Roman rule: a new church is born

Hampton Court Palace

The LibraryWhere history happened: a history of disability. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Antique double-hemisphere map of the world, complete with landscapes and mythological scenes. (GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

5 big questions in global history

Illustration by Jonty Clark.

Ye olde travel guide: Dublin AD 1000. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

A runestone depicting two warriors fighting and the journey of the Vikings to Valhalla, the hall of slain. (DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

The Vikings at home. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

An illustration titled ‘The petition for abolishing the slave trade’, from Amelia Opie’s ’The Black Man's Lament; or How to Make Sugar’, London, 1826. “Come, listen to my plaintive ditty,/Ye tender hearts, and children dear!/And, should it move your souls to pity,/Oh! try to end the griefs you hear.” (Photo by Photo 12/UIG via Getty Images)

9 key places connected to the abolition of the British slave trade. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Detail of a column showing Norman soldiers, c12th century. (CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)

In search of the Normans: who were they?

A Victorian drawing room with pictures in heavy frames and ornately covered furniture, c1860. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Where history happened: Victorian collectors. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

An illustration depicting medieval pilgrims. (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

The LibraryMedieval tourism: pilgrimages and tourist destinations

A contemporary view of the river Seine and Notre-Dame de Paris. (Getty Images)

Ye Olde Travel Guide: Paris 1802. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The Norman Conquest. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

BBC History Magazine

The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England

When did the practice of funeral rings begin/end and how widespread was it?

Mikado Maids

A big day in history: Gilbert and Sullivan unveil 'The Mikado'

Too good for the gallery

An 18th century village in Germany. Strict laws regulated the goods that each social class could buy. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Beware what you buy: the goods German citizens were forbidden to consume

A portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer from an early 15th-century manuscript of the poem ‘De Regimine Principum’ by Thomas Hoccleve. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The LibraryChaucer and the idea of Englishness

A c15th-century vellum shows the Squire from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. For Adam Nicolson, the essence of the gentry was “government-through-networking”. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Stories of the gentry

Angela Burdett-Coutts, an English philanthropist who supported a wide variety of charitable causes assisting the church, the poor and the hungry. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)

Philanthropy: the root of all good

BBC History Magazine

If I ran the country, I’d throw Halloween on the bonfire

BBC History Magazine

All history lies to us, but at least historical fiction admits it

The front page of the first edition of The Sun newspaper. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)

A big day in history: The Sun first appeared on shelves in newsagents

1492: The Year Our World Began