Feature

For the Portuguese empire to rise, an old world had to give way. Rivals in Europe’s lucrative spice trade, how much did they know about the powerful Mamluk sultanate?

British soldiers fighting in the American Revolutionary War were unprepared for the terrain awaiting them across the Atlantic. Many thought that America was determined to destroy them; some felt it had succeeded.

The first year of Edward I’s reign saw waves of strictures placed on a Jewish community in an already perilous situation. It set the path to their expulsion.

Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning flourished.

For much of the 20th century, young working-class women in England found out about procreation the ‘hard way’ or the ‘dirty way’.

Caught between the antagonistic states of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is stuck in geopolitical limbo. Its location – and its history – threaten to keep it there.

As convicts celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday on remote Norfolk Island, debates raged over the purpose of punishment and the merits of Alexander Maconochie’s project of moral reform.

An attempt to prosecute German war criminals in 1921 failed to such an extent that the entire enterprise is largely forgotten. What went wrong?

National security during the Second World War was threatened by the ‘enemy within’ – working-class women, suspected of betraying their country by taking in deserters and escapees.

Indulgent symbol of papist excess or mouthpiece for God’s second greatest gift? What place was there for the organ in the Reformation church?