Dockers unloading wine barrels

Social history

Windows: an illuminating history

Bulldog burners and dungboys: classifying occupations in British censuses (1841-1911)

How a ballerina survived the Gulag

How did pasta come to Europe and when did it first become established in Italy?

Egyptian pharaohs: everything you wanted to know

How dogs shaped city life

7 weird and wonderful Georgian beauty treatments

(Illustration: Clair Rossiter for BBC History Magazine)

Beans, ale & 'windy meats': surprising 17th-century aphrodisiacs

Jodie Comer plays Marguerite de Carrouges in the upcoming film 'The Last Duel',

“A spotlight on historic societal misogyny and disbelief of women”: what The Last Duel gets right and wrong

Supernatural stories: 9 unusual British folktales

A scene from the German film 'Ways to Strength and Beauty', 1925. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)

Second World War

Germany’s naked truth: the 19th-century nudism movements co-opted by the Nazis

Asia’s anti-imperial revolutionaries

Tourists at Stonehenge. We have no better idea today than 200 years ago what the people who erected these sarsens truly believed. (Getty Images)

Prehistoric religion: a pagan riddle we will never solve?

Suffragettes photographed in a dispute with the police

Jujitsu suffragettes: how women fought for the vote with an ancient martial art

A family history of France

Illustration of the Red Dragon of China

Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower?

Apartheid: everything you wanted to know

An illustration from The Travels of Marco Polo, showing a teenage Marco on the deck of a ship sailing away from Venice

Why are Marco Polo's travels so famous?

Trial by combat: the real history behind The Last Duel

A West Indian immigrant in 1960s Britain: A real lonely Londoner

A 14th-century illustration shows two bishops watching men fight to the death in a trial by combat.

Medieval trial by combat: the real history behind The Last Duel

A medieval miniature depicts a monk and a woman in a bed.

Sex in the Middle Ages: have attitudes really changed?

A woodcut showing the interior of a kitchen in Elizabethan England. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Hold your noses: the smells, sounds and sights of Elizabethan England

A 12-year-old boy with a large bruise on his face ‘pulls threads’ in a New York sweatshop

The 19th-century slums of New York

Unexpected Edwardians

An allegorical depiction of the plague in ancient Rome, an angel batters down a door while people lie sick on the ground

The reign of Roman disease: why did disease hit a flourishing empire?

A mosaic that shows two Roman women exercising, one holds a flower and another holds a leaf

7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Roman women

Tony Robinson as Private Baldrick and Rowan Atkinson as Captain Blackadder

Q&AWas there a real Blackadder?

Jodie Comer plays Marguerite de Carrouges in the upcoming film 'The Last Duel',

The medieval women who spoke out against sexual violence

An illustration of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865

Jamaica's Morant Bay Rebellion: brutality and outrage in the British empire