History Matters

Reports from the First Crusade brought tales of victorious Christian soldiers eating dead bodies.

Margaret Thatcher struggled to write her own speeches. Who put the words in her mouth?

In 19th-century America abortion was weaponised as part of a culture war.

For 18th-century smugglers in Guernsey and the Isle of Man, plague was a business opportunity.

The greatest early modern authority on Ottoman Greece was Martin Cruisius – a man who had never left Germany.

How did medieval holy men cope with the strictures their devotion placed upon them?

Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito.

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud with Gladstone.

As Christianity spread, it carried Catherine of Siena’s legacy to the Americas. Her asceticism inspired Rose of Lima, Kateri Tekakwitha, and others.

Thieves, cheats, and scoundrels. How did early modern millers get their bad reputations?