Depending on one’s vantage point, the meaning of the French Revolution varies. The First Republic succumbed to an imperial ...

Court-martialled in absentia on 2 August 1940, the Vichy regime confiscated de Gaulle’s property and condemned him to death.

An early modern ship’s surgeon had to treat not just broken bones but distress and trauma. I n September 1649 ship’s surgeon ...

The wine trade in medieval Tunis was lucrative, but it caused a moral quandary for the ruling Hafsids.

José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz, collects the works of Cuba's ‘Apostle of Independence’.

Ancient Egypt’s bureaucratic society depended on an army of scribes. To get ahead, you had to be able to write – but that didn’t necessarily mean mastering hieroglyphs.

John Hanning Speke, an army officer’s son from the West Country, was commissioned into the army of the East India Company in 1844 at the age of seventeen. In 1854 he eagerly joined an expedition to ...

Cosimo was the elder son and successor of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, who founded the Medici Bank in the 1390s, opened branches in Rome, Venice and Naples and went on to take charge of the Vatican’s ...

The 19th-century Korean peninsula was a chessboard on which the fates of great powers were decided. China, Japan and Russia learned this to their cost in the 'Other Great Game’.

The two leading figures of the South American wars of independence were Simon Bolivar in the north and José de San Martín in the south. Their paths met in Ecuador, where the modest and unselfish San ...

Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince von Bismarck, prime minister of Prussia for almost thirty years and from 1871 to 1890 the first chancellor of the German Empire, which recognised him as its founder, died ...

The Society of Jesus was founded in Rome in 1539 by Ignatius of Loyola and nine companions, all priests, who placed themselves under a vow of obedience to Pope Paul III. Ignatius was a former soldier, ...