History Today

First Tenochtitlán, then Cuzco, then Machu Picchu – why shouldn’t cities paved with gold be discovered in South America? At least Percy Fawcett believed so.

‘A day in the life’ of the 18th-century Bank of England.

Which person in history would I most like to have met? Mihri Hatun, a poet of Ottoman Bursa, who dared to state that a clever woman was worth 1,000 incompetent men. 

In January 1848, in the Sicilian city of Palermo, the streets began to fill with crowds. From here, revolutionary sparks flew to almost all of Europe’s cities.

It’s the most tired of historical clichés, but is it so for a reason? Who writes history? Four would-be winners debate.

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope is a Whiggish history of humanism from the Renaissance to the present.

Prison hulks were a flawed system, but that was not what finished them off. 

The Windrush generation witnessed the Caribbean colonies from which they had emigrated achieve independence. Despite being an ocean away, they were not passive observers. 

The Anglo-Portuguese alliance is the oldest of its kind. Concluded in June 1373, it has survived world wars, the rise and fall of empires and globalisation. How?