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 ...

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.

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, ...

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 ...

In the late 70s AD Marcus Cerrinius Vatia ran for the lower magisterial office of aedile in the ancient city of Pompeii. More than 80 inscriptions, painted on the walls of the city’s buildings, record ...

In 1866 James Hole, a writer from Leeds, called for ‘a little wholesome despotism’ in tackling the problems of housing the urban working classes. He was not alone in favouring a no-nonsense, top-down ...

In 1938 the American literary critic Howard Mumford Jones published an article in The Atlantic titled ‘Patriotism – but How?’ As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Jones observed how fascist ...

Surprises aren’t something you normally associate with the study of ancient Greek drama. Yet in September 2024 scholars meeting at the University of Colorado Boulder were treated to just that. Two ...

Helen Cam (1885-1968), the first woman to be elected to a chair at Harvard, was a formidable English medievalist. Unusually for a legal historian, she had a keen eye for the human dramas not entirely ...

On 27 October 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic came into being as part of the Soviet Union, four years after a group of Muslim modernisers had formed an unholy alliance with a cohort of ...

In June 1947 Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane over Mount Rainier in Washington when nine bright objects began tracking him at high speed. People have always seen signs and wonders in the skies, ...