Toothbrushing has been a regular part of most people’s daily routines since the mid-20th century, but it was only a few decades earlier that the British state first began to impress upon the public ...

In the first of a new series, we ask historians one of the burning questions of the day.

Donald Trump has often been likened to Aaron Burr, described as ‘one of the most unprincipled men in the United States’. His isolationism, however, owes more to Thomas Jefferson.

Lost Countries of South America, Laurence Blair makes the case for the region. Blair, a British journalist living in Paraguay, tells the stories of nine South American ‘nations’ that either broke up, ...

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the ...

In the late 70s AD Marcus Cerrinius Vatia ran for the lower magisterial office of aedile in the ancient city of Pompeii. More than 80 inscriptions, painted on the walls of the city’s buildings, record ...

On 27 July MPs filed into Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons to cast the first ever votes for a Conservative leader. The bookmakers expected a Maudling victory. Maudling agreed and, having cast ...

As rude rhymes and rumours threatened reputations, the Elizabethan government attempted to regulate barbed language.

The First World War and its aftermath are often paired with the rise of modernism, that moral and aesthetic juggernaut that so deranged our senses. But the stirrings of modernism, and some of its ...

In 1866 James Hole, a writer from Leeds, called for ‘a little wholesome despotism’ in tackling the problems of housing the urban working classes. He was not alone in favouring a no-nonsense, top-down ...

In 1938 the American literary critic Howard Mumford Jones published an article in The Atlantic titled ‘Patriotism – but How?’ As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Jones observed how fascist ...