Lost Countries of South America, Laurence Blair makes the case for the region. Blair, a British journalist living in Paraguay, tells the stories of nine South American ‘nations’ that either broke up, ...

Donald Trump has often been likened to Aaron Burr, described as ‘one of the most unprincipled men in the United States’. His isolationism, however, owes more to Thomas Jefferson.

Toothbrushing has been a regular part of most people’s daily routines since the mid-20th century, but it was only a few decades earlier that the British state first began to impress upon the public ...

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the ...

The Battle of Solferino, fought in northern Italy in 1859, was a decisive episode in the struggle for Italian independence, in the birth of the Red Cross movement and in the creation of the Geneva ...

The year before Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, another writer, Olympe de Gouges, published a comparable call for equality during the turmoil of revolutionary France.

Anna Maria Angelica Catharina Kauffman was not only a rare example of a highly successful and extremely rich female artist but an adornment of European high society. The only child of an Austrian ...

Antoine-Joseph Sax was one of the most prolific musical instrument designers of the 19th century. Many of his instruments, including the saxotromba, saxhorn, saxtuba and the saxophone, came about as a ...

Roman politics after the Emperor Diocletian abdicated in AD 305 was confusingly complicated as emperors and deputy emperors of the West and of the East contended for power. Among them was Flavius ...

'The rich’, so the saying goes, ‘are not like us'. If this is true of anyone it is true of Howard Hughes, billionaire businessman and one of the twentieth century's most elusive personalities. But ...

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud. After his death in 1953 he was succeeded by Saud, the eldest of his 45 sons by his innumerable wives. The next most prominent figure in the ...

In the first of a new series, we ask historians one of the burning questions of the day.