The emirate of Granada – Islam’s last polity in Spain – was surrendered to the Catholic monarchs on 2 January 1492.

On 25 December 336 Rome’s believers celebrated Christmas Day – the earliest recorded use of that date as it spread across ...

The body belonged to Charles d’Espagne, constable of France and its most powerful figure after the king, Jean II. The man ...

The Raj’s control of India’s princely states was never absolute, as the British-appointed tutor to the last maharajah of ...

History Today was launched, but in what ways? I can’t remember when I first read History Today: probably not in 1951, when I was seven, but soon afterwards my parents bought me a subscription, since ...

When the aurora borealis appeared in the skies of 18th-century Europe, Enlightenment scientists first turned to history to understand it.

Since 1708 there has been vicious competition over the Spanish treasure galleon San José, its cargo, and, now, its sunken remains.

In 1563 Elizabeth Flynte, a servant from Haselor, Warwickshire, described the extra-marital activities of her mistress to the church court of the Lichfield diocese: He come in here this night, ...

The rules for young officers at West Point Military Academy in New York were strict. Alcohol possession could lead to expulsion and even smoking tobacco could affect one’s chances of graduating. Of ...

A brilliant inventor and engineer, William George Armstrong was also an armaments magnate, a considerate and generous man who manufactured killing machinery in large quantitities. Born in 1810, the ...

The war between the States ended in 1865 with the North victorious and the Confederate South defeated. Slavery in the South was now illegal, the former slaves had the vote and groups of white ...

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin, who called him ‘my Himmler’. Involved in revolutionary activities from his teens and head of the secret police in Georgia in his twenties, he ...