Thomas Cromwell’s final six months were a Greek tragedy of hubris and political venom, all presided over by a tyrannical king ...

“Tory spending cuts send us back to the misery of the Victorian workhouse,” cried a Mirror headline in 2010. Workhouses were “bleak, grimly austere and oppressive”, wrote the author of a study of one ...

Historians Tim Thornton and Tracy Borman tell our podcast editor Ellie Cawthorne about a remarkable new discovery that may ...

There are plenty of other contenders for worst Roman Emperor – Nero and Commodus for example – but Caligula's mad reign sets a high standard. After a promising start to his reign he seems to have set ...

In this three-part series exclusively available to members of HistoryExtra, Janina Ramirez, a leading popular historian, offers a fresh look at the medieval world through the women usually written out ...

The history of toothpaste has to be split into two: the first part goes back thousands of years when ancient civilisations around the world all made their own important advances in dental hygiene; the ...

A skilled and courageous frontiersman who became a politician; an outspoken and popular politician who was transformed into an American folk hero; a homespun storytelling folk hero who was later known ...

The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 will never be considered one of the world’s significant conflicts; it wasn’t even the biggest for the British during that decade, with the Second Boer War coming a few ...

Lauren Good is the digital content producer at HistoryExtra. She joined the team in 2022 after completing an MA in Creative Writing, and she holds a first-class degree in English and Classical Studies ...

The future Mary I and Thomas Cromwell were diametrically opposed in every way that mattered. She was a staunch Roman Catholic; he a reformist who masterminded the destruction of the monasteries and ...

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator makes certain you know exactly who Maximus Decimus Meridius is: “Commander of the armies of the north, general of the Felix Legions. Loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus ...