Except for aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. There are people who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were really by the Earl of Oxford, that JFK was ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a case for the Rennaissance as a triumph not of individuality, but of ...

The sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

Individuals are not happy in proportion to the amount of space their persons occupy. Yet certain nations, at certain periods of their history, seem to take it for granted that the wider they spread ...

Donald Trump’s electoral comeback has provoked a lot of analysis from political scientists. Historians have been slower to engage with the subject. By temperament they are inclined to seek a longer ...

In September 1781, Thomas Hughes, then 22, visited Brighton for what he hoped would be a restorative holiday. It was not his first trip: such sojourns were common for Hughes. But on this occasion ...

Born in 1654 to the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Elizabeth Cavendish was the eldest of six children. Granddaughter to both Civil War general William Cavendish and prominent MP William ...

As Revolution broke out and turned to Terror, British citizens living in France found themselves transformed from friends of liberty to an enemy within. The Younger Pitt and the Ochakov Affair In 1791 ...

The officers of the Austro-Hungarian cruiser Sankt Georg, flagship of the Fifth Division, sat down to lunch in the wardroom. In the lobby outside the ship’s orchestra began to play, according to ...

The Russians were among the first Europeans to sense California's potential. Had they not sold their settlement there in 1841 ...