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The Woman Who Took on the Fashion Industry to Save the Birds

A global trade in feathers, with London at its heart, saw hundreds of millions of birds killed every year. Emily Williamson waged a long and furious campaign against it

By Malcolm Smith / History Today

What We Can Learn From the U.K.'s Mid-Pandemic 1918 Election

The U.K. general election of 1918 was a ‘cynical muddle’ held as influenza killed thousands across a country emerging from World War I

By Peter Keeling / History Today

How a Miniature Emancipation Proclamation Helped Recruit Black Soldiers During the Civil War

The sight of Black soldiers distributing print to other Black people in a state that criminalized the teaching of reading to the enslaved summoned up a future shaped by the possibility of increased self-determination

By Madeline Zehnder / History Today

What We Get Wrong About Medieval Libraries

Medieval manuscripts reveal the reading communities of the early Middle Ages

By Mateusz Fafinski / History Today

The Overlooked Role of Women in the American Revolution

Spinning yarn is work that has become invisible in modern life. But at the dawn of the American Revolution, it was revolutionary

By Marta Olmos / History Today

The Long History of Drinking Games—And How to Win Them

The first guide to drinking is a Latin poem published in 1536

By Michael Fontaine / History Today

How the Rise of the Working Wife Changed British Society

A momentous change in the status of women began in the 1950s

By Helen McCarthy / History Today

Why Are There 360 Degrees in a Circle?

As Greek geometry developed, it created the concept of an angle as a magnitude

By Mark Ronan / History Today

The Past and Future of Punctuation Marks

In classical times there were no punctuation marks or spaces between words. Here's how that changed

By Florence Hazrat / History Today

What We Can Learn From Ancient Graffiti

The earliest graffiti of a person’s name on a monument has been identified by the historian Lionel Casson in a cave at Wadi Hammamat in Egypt — the name of Hena, an official under Menutuhotep III in 2000 BC

By Laura Aitken-Burt / History Today

A Historic U.K. Law Was Passed After a Wave of Anti-Migrant Sentiment. Here's How It Shaped British Immigration Policy

The Aliens Act of 1905 created a new type of immigrant to the U.K. and a new way of dealing with them

By Marc Di Tommasi / History Today

The Long Debate Over What Counts as a Concentration Camp

Even for Nazi camp survivors who sought to eradicate them, they were hard to define

By Emma Kuby / History Today

What the History of Beards Reveals About the Changing Meaning of Masculinity

The historian Christopher Oldstone-Moore identifies "four great beard movements" that punctuate history

By Eleanor Rycroft / History Today

With Shipping in the Strait of Hormuz Once Again Under Threat, These Are the Lessons of the 1980s Tanker War

If tensions in the Persian Gulf lead to war, it will not be the first time

By Martin S. Navias / History Today

Where Brexit Fits in the Long British History of Petitioning Parliament

In the centuries before universal suffrage, petitioning was an indispensable tool to represent public opinion in the U.K.

By Philip Loft / History Today

The Legend of Robin Hood Is Centuries Old—But the Way We Tell His Story Has Changed

Every generation has its own Robin, adapted to fit the needs of the time

By Sean McGlynn / History Today

How an Italian Hospital Saved Patients From Nazis by Inventing a Fake Disease

This was one instance where disinformation, fear and ignorance worked as a force for good

By Francesco Buscemi / History Today

Inside a Young Fidel Castro's 1940 Letter to an American President

"My good friend Roosvelt," opens a letter a young Castro sent to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, written on Nov. 6, 1940

By Luis Martínez-Fernández / History Today

The Surprisingly Mysterious Story of the World's First Filmmaker

On Sept. 16, 1890, just before he was due to demonstrate his films in public for the first time, he boarded the Dijon to Paris train and was never seen again.

By Irfan Shah / History Today

Behind the Scenes at the House of Commons Library

Jane Fiddick, a junior library clerk who joined in 1963, is likely to have been the first woman officer of the House of Commons

By Eleanor Davis / History Today
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