History Matters

As the Thirty Years War ravaged the Continent, news reached England of strange phenomena. What did it portend?

It has been 60 years since the Aberfan disaster of 1966, but memories of corporate failings and injustice persist.

In the 19th century nascent copyright law allowed brands to use fine art in their advertising. It raised prestige, sales, and controversy.

With the price of meat soaring, a new source offered a cheap solution – if only the Victorian public could be convinced of the benefits of hippophagy.

On 6 October 1802 Ludwig van Beethoven confessed his despair at the loss of his hearing in the Heiligenstadt Testament.

In 1935 Turkmen farmers rode their horses 4,300 kilometres across the Soviet Union to impress Moscow.

The consequences of Carthusian defiance showed the brutality of the dissolution of the monasteries.

Sailors looking for work in the 19th century risked getting crimped – or shanghaied – and caught in a whirlpool of exploitation and corruption.

During the Kenya Emergency, white women took up arms against the Mau Mau rebels. What did it mean to be both domestic and violent?

As advances in Soviet science in the 1950s were published in Russian, English-speaking scientists risked getting left behind.