History Matters

For the Victorians and Edwardians, the late British summer was a time of sun, sand – and sea serpents.

A routine Native American cattle round-up at the US-Mexico border in 1898 became an international incident.

The wine trade in medieval Tunis was lucrative, but it caused a moral quandary for the ruling Hafsids.

Life at sea was hard. An early modern ship’s surgeon had to treat not just broken bones but distress and trauma. 

Malibu’s 1960s Beauty Farm aimed to get a new generation of teenagers marriage-ready

How should we see the natural world? For Descartes it was a mechanism, but a wondrous one.

Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some controversy.

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received.

In the early 20th century the prison population in England and Wales was in sharp decline, despite a rise in crime. 

Were the lost bones of medieval King Ethelbert hidden in Sherborne Abbey? A convenient discovery suggested they were.