For 18th-century smugglers in Guernsey and the Isle of Man, plague was a business opportunity.

Wives for the settlers at Jamestown by William Ludwell Sheppard, 1876. New York Public Library. Public Domain.

Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World by Edith Hall sees the signs of environmental collapse amid the adventures of Achilles. Hall begins by tracing the poem’s ...

In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, Sam Wetherell discovers a city of slavery, ships, soccer, and socialism, whose ...

Tsuda was a decorated veteran of the Satsuma Rebellion. He was an ultra-nationalist; his crime was ‘loyalty run mad’, one ...

Writing from the safety of exile in eastern Tennessee, in the late 1850s the fiery Irish nationalist John Mitchel published a series of articles in his proslavery newspaper the Southern Citizen. In ...

The greatest early modern authority on Ottoman Greece was Martin Cruisius – a man who had never left Germany.

Vladislav Zubok is Professor of International History at LSE. His latest book is The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 ...

On the morning of 27 April 1953 Yugoslavia’s communist leader Josip Broz Tito received the Costa Rican diplomat Teodoro Castro in a simply furnished room at the White Palace in Belgrade. Tito had ...

The Merovingians have a reputation for long hair and barbarity. Instead, the dynasty, born out of the chaos of civil war, was one of peace, diplomacy, and bureaucracy.

How did medieval holy men cope with the strictures their devotion placed upon them?

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...