History Matters

Get Miscellanies, our free weekly long read, in your inbox every week

How did Sun Tzu and The Art of War become synonymous with strategy in the West?

The experiences of medieval university students are familiar: they missed their mothers, asked for money and got into trouble.

When it arrived on the Victorian stage, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre had a cast of new characters and a new social order.

What was there to fear from a medieval inquisition? For the inquisitors, quite a lot.

A Black Jewish man arrived in Venice with stories of a lost Jewish kingdom that could save Europe’s Jews. Why was he believed?

When a Victorian celebrity sportsman was found to be taking performance-enhancing drugs it caused a sensation, not a scandal.

Privatisation of Chile’s natural resources was a pillar of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

Evelyn Cheesman travelled to Vanuatu and brought back a poison-tipped spear and a new understanding of the natural world.

Hollywood’s Cold War dissidents in Ireland.

A now commonplace device, Joseph Priestley’s timeline revolutionised how we view history.