Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some ...

In the summer of 1668 commissioners of the Swedish Lutheran Church arrived in the parish of Maarja-Magdaleena in northern Estonia. On Midsummer’s Eve (23 June) the commissioners witnessed how the ...

Robert Darnton’s new book revisits classic debates regarding the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution by exploring the literary world of late 18th-century France.

On 5 July 1852 the curtain came down on Barney Barnato, one of the richest men in South Africa. Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the ...

In 1453 the Orthodox city of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, fell to the forces of Mehmed II. Christians fled and the city began its transformation into the seat of the Ottoman ...

How did Western Europe learn of the fall of Constantinople, the loss of Negroponte, and the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto? In the early modern era all news was slow news.