History Today

Revealing Mary

Angela McShane Jones asks what depictions in broadsides of Mary II with her breasts exposed, tell us about 17th-century popular attitudes to royalty.

The Birth of Amerigo Vespucci

The ‘most controversial character in the history of discovery’ was born on March 9th, 1454. But who was Amerigo Vespucci?

Murder Most Foul

Robert Garland asks what murder meant to the apparently bloodthirsty Greeks and Romans.

The Dead Beneath our Feet

Nicholas Orme considers how the crowded cities of medieval England dealt with the death and burial of their citizens.