The mastermind behind the infamous Gunpowder Plot was not Guy Fawkes, but Robert Catesby. Guy Fawkes was just the fall guy ...

Previously known as New Amsterdam and formerly in the hands of the Dutch, in 1664 the settlement, now known as New York, ...

The British Empire is remembered for its extensive, long-lasting and far-reaching imperial activities that ushered in an era of globalisation and connectivity. The British Empire began in its ...

One of England’s most beloved poets and a pioneer of Romanticism, William Wordsworth was made Poet Laureate in 1843. William was born in Cockermouth in Cumbria on 7th April 1770 to John Wordsworth, a ...

The South Sea Bubble has been called: the world’s first financial crash, the world’s first Ponzi scheme, speculation mania and a disastrous example of what can happen when people fall prey to ‘group ...

“There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.” Oscar Wilde in his novel, ‘The Picture of ...

The Highland Clearances remain a controversial period in Scotland’s history and are still talked of with great bitterness, particularly by those families who were dispossessed of their land and even, ...

“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as a good tavern or inn.” So wrote Samuel Johnson and for many, this remains true today. Think of an ...

There have always been fashion ‘tribes’, from fops and beaux, bucks and dandies to Goths and punks, but the ‘macaronis’ of the 1760s and 1770s exceeded them all in their dedication to excess and ...

What was it like to be a child in the 1920s and 1930s? What was it like to go to school and what games did children play in the inter-war period? Life in the 1920s and 1930s, the era of the Great ...

You may not have heard of it, but The Pilgrimage of Grace was the single largest rebellion in Tudor history and took place in the North of England between October 1536 and January 1537. The common ...

Britain’s ports and harbours were once menaced by the dreaded press-gangs. Impressment, to give it its proper name, was the scourge of maritime communities across the British Isles and Britain’s North ...