History Today

Dressing in historical clothes can reveal things about the past that no book can.

The medieval approach to emergency planning may offer lessons for the 21st century.

For wealthy tourists travelling to the Middle East in the 19th century, the services of a dragoman were an essential purchase. Yet the often difficult lives of these local agents and guides remain elusive. 

Even in a pastoral idyll, there is death.

‘Timing is everything.’

Roman poet Catullus transformed an unremarkable bird – the sparrow – into a contested symbol of eroticism.

For more than a century, what is now Yemen has seen waves of insurgency and conflict backed by competing foreign powers. 

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.