Short History Of...

In the early nineteenth century, engineers discovered that steam power and iron rails could be combined to move people and goods faster than any horse or ox could. Within a few decades, railways had s...

The first and only successful uprising of enslaved people to establish a nation-state, the Haitian Revolution began in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791. Inspired, in part, by the ideals of ...

In the early years of the twentieth century, long before James Bond stepped onto the page, one man was at work as a new kind of spy. He crossed borders as easily as he changed names, slipped between g...

The story of Franco’s rise to power and the painful, repressive regime he oversaw is fundamentally interlinked with that of the Spanish Civil War. A brutal three-year conflict that laid bare the ideol...

Sir Francis Drake is most famous for his role in defeating the Armada of 1588 and saving England from a Spanish invasion. By that point in his life, he was already a wealthy and famous seafarer: the f...

The American singer-songwriter and musician Bob Dylan is one of the most important recording artists on the planet. A cultural icon, his work has had a profound influence on popular music since the 19...

In the decades since the United States declared their independence from Britain, the question of slavery had become increasingly divisive. As the nation expanded, fragile political agreements over the...

The American Civil War started with a single, explosive question: could a nation built on slavery survive without it? Several Southern states chose to protect the institution that underpinned their ec...

In 1914, Europe was dominated by four great empires — the British, the French, the Russian, and the vast, uneasy realm of Austria-Hungary, stretching from the Alps to the Balkans. While international ...

One of the most famous writers of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis was a scholar of medieval literature, an influential Christian thinker and a supremely gifted storyteller. A professor at the universiti...