How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. I n March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of ...

On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I n the 30 ...

I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

Italy’s entry into the Great War in 1915 prompted 300,000 men to return to their homeland to join the fight. Were they Italian enough for Italy?

I n 1968, Fatah, the Palestinian political party, published its first series of protest posters. Clenched fists, raised arms, ammunition belts, bayonets, rifles – these posters were statements of ...

‘Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, sir?’ The question came from a 14-year-old boy on a school tour of the Minoan Room at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1936. The man being addressed was ...

In the early 20th century the prison population in England and Wales was in sharp decline, despite a rise in crime. The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert ...

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On June 23rd, 1700, at Hampton Court Palace, William III knighted the financier Solomon de Medina – the first member of the Jewish community to be thus honoured: it would be 137 years before another ...

L ong before advances in technology made robots possible, the ancient Greeks explored the idea of creating artificial life in a series of vivid myths about androids and animated statues. As far back ...

Sometime around the year 1015 a monk at the cathedral of Sens in northern France wrote a chronicle of the Frankish people. He was a little sketchy on the early centuries, though he knew that ...