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

The Making of a Prehistoric Human by Peter Sahlins charts the ascent of an idea from prehistory to popular culture.

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

Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four by Susan Pedersen wonders whether a radical relationship might offer inspiration for a ...

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

What’s the most exciting field in history today? The continuing retrieval of forgotten voices.’ ...

Amy Fuller looks at the life of the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and asks why we feel the need to kill our heroines rather than celebrate their achievements. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a ...

They have long had a notorious reputation as the raiders and pirates of the medieval world and certainly it is not unjustified: their raids were fearsome and long-running. However, they were also ...

In 480 BC a vast Persian army under king Xerxes crossed into Greece. The invasion was triggered by Athens’ defeat of a Persian army at Marathon ten years earlier, but this was a far bigger force and ...

With the US riven by civil war, Napoleon III seized the opportunity to install an emperor in Mexico. Maximilian’s new regime soon fell apart. On 19 June 1867, Ferdinand Maximilian faced a firing squad ...

American history has always been decided by its people, as England learned when it attempted to impose harsh trade restrictions on its new colony in the 17th century. Despite what the behaviour of its ...

Before the Spanish conquest, the history of the Aztec Empire was recorded orally and with hieroglyphs. In danger of being lost or forgotten, Indigenous historians began to write it down. In Mexico ...