After watching a BBC report on Ethiopia's 'biblical famine,' Bob Geldof puts a band of rock stars together and records a song that sparks a global response, inspiring millions.

Ever wondered why English is so wildly inconsistent? Why dough, tough and bough look like cousins but sound like strangers? Or why you can run out, run up, run over, or even run down, and each one mea...

In the quiet halls of Germany’s historic university towns, a distinctive sound might once have echoed through the courtyards: the sharp clash of steel against steel, punctuated by the measured footfal...

ALT: a man in a tuxedo stands in front of a group of men wearing hats with the letter a on them

Most career criminals make headlines for their violence or brash defiance. Jeffrey Manchester, however, earned his notoriety by being unfailingly polite, oddly considerate, and for living in places mo...

It’s strange to think that a shy, awkward mathematician who loved long-distance running and chemical experiments would end up cracking Nazi codes, dreaming up the modern computer and, heartbreakingly,...

If you chat to anyone who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s, chances are they’ll remember the grim terror that was polio. It was a disease that lurked silently each summer, striking down children, paralys...

When Lord of the Flies first arrived on bookshop shelves on 17 September 1954, it did so with little fanfare and modest expectations. Yet William Golding’s unsettling tale of shipwrecked English schoolboys tearing away the thin skin of civilisation has since become a defining work of twentieth, century literature, taught, debated and adapted in countless forms. This remarkable survival story, however, extends beyond the boys on the island: the novel itself very nearly never saw the light of day.

In the early summer of 1982, Roberto Calvi, chairman of Italy’s largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, vanished from the intricate world of European high finance. By then, Calvi was a man living on b...

In the 1970s, Lawrenceville, Georgia, was hardly the sort of place you’d expect to see splashed across national headlines. It sat about thirty miles out from Atlanta — close enough for commuters, quie...

Strolling through any European art gallery that houses works from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, one cannot help but notice something oddly humorous: the baby Jesus — and indeed most other ...

On a cold January evening in 1958, an open cornfield near a quiet pond in Robeson County, North Carolina, became the unlikely stage for one of the most remarkable local acts of defiance against the Ku...

In an age long before swipes, likes and texted emojis, Victorian society found its own coded means for a glance across a ballroom to evolve into something more. Among the discreet tools in the arsenal...

When seven of America’s most powerful corporate leaders raised their right hands before Congress on 14 April 1994, the world watched to see if they would finally acknowledge what countless scientific ...

What if I told you that one of the largest human gatherings ever recorded for a concert—an estimated 1.5 million people—took place not in the open fields of Glastonbury or under the bright lights of M...

When people think of the Empire State Building, they picture a towering, steel-framed icon slicing into the Manhattan skyline. But behind its 102-storey silhouette lies a story just as awe-inspiring—o...

In the early summer of 68 CE, the last direct descendant of Julius Caesar and Augustus lay trembling in a suburban villa outside Rome, deserted by nearly everyone who once swore fealty to him. Just th...

On 6 October 1966, a date acid enthusiasts half-jokingly refer to as 'The Day of the Beast,' California became the first US state to criminalise the possession of LSD. Two years later, the prohibition...

In the quiet hours following death, long before photography could capture a likeness, artisans turned to wax and plaster to preserve the human face. The resulting object—a death mask—was not merely a ...

In 1997, amidst a storm of lawsuits, congressional hearings, and public outrage against the tobacco industry, an odd little product slipped quietly onto the market. It was called Bravo, and while it l...

When Feliks Scazighino was just six years old, the world as he knew it collapsed. Along with millions of other Polish civilians in 1940, his family was forcibly removed from their home in Kresy—then t...

At precisely 05:12 AM on the morning of Wednesday, 18 April 1906, Northern California was torn from its slumber. The earth convulsed violently beneath the region’s feet, as a rupture along the infamou...

The annals of American crime are replete with tales of passion and violence, but few cases in recent memory have captivated the public quite like the murder of Travis Alexander by his ex-girlfriend, J...

“What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner. Slave. There’s no way around it.” — Leonard LakeIt started, as so many grim tales do, with something as mundane as shoplifting. On 2 June 1985, a man name...

In the early summer of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a place of contradictions. It was a city on the rise, oil-rich, bustling with new money, and sharply divided by race. In the north, the Greenwood Dist...

By 1970, The Doors were teetering on the edge. The past five years had been a whirlwind: hit records, sold-out tours, obscenity trials, public breakdowns, and ever-deepening alcoholism on the part of ...

These days, we don’t give colour photography a second thought. It’s everywhere. From the high-res selfies on your phone to vintage film simulations on Instagram, colour has become so normal, so ever-p...

In the summer of 1943, as Allied forces plotted the downfall of Hitler and Mussolini, a little-known episode played out in the Caribbean. A young British naval intelligence officer named Ian Fleming a...

It’s one of those stories that sounds more like legend than fact, yet tucked away in the quiet, windswept monasteries of Mount Athos, it seems to have genuinely happened. Mihailo Tolotos, a Greek Orth...

When police raided William Bradford’s Los Angeles apartment in 1984, they weren’t just looking for evidence of two murders. What they found instead was a window into something far more unsettling, a c...

For more than 30 years, Mary Filan — a widowed 74-year-old woman semi-paralysed from a recent stroke — had lived in Apartment 6B, 143-15 Barclay Avenue, in Flushing, Queens. Her flat was modest, but i...

At the dawn of the 20th century, Beach Haven had the feel of a seaside postcard come to life. Situated at the southern tip of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, this idyllic resort town was the embodiment...

There was once a time when Parisians traded the grand boulevards and zinc-topped cafés of the capital for something rather more whimsical: lunch in the treetops, champagne among the chestnut leaves, a...

In 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received an extraordinary bequest from Columbia University librarian Herbert Mitchell, a lifelong collector of historical ephemera. Upon his death, Mitchell lef...

When it opened its doors in May 2007, Dickens World promised visitors the chance to step directly into the fog-shrouded, gaslit streets of Charles Dickens’ imagination. Nestled within Chatham Dockside...

The names Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb have become synonymous with the chilling and macabre narrative of youthful transgression in early 20th-century America. Their story, a gruesome chapter in the...

"My mom."That’s all eight-year-old Christie Downs needed to say. After surviving a stroke and slowly regaining her ability to speak, this soft-spoken reply to investigators shattered the alibi of her ...

“Criminals are made, not born.”That was the message painted on a charred wooden sign left behind on the fence of Andrew Kehoe’s farm in Bath Township, Michigan. On 18 May 1927, Kehoe—once regarded as ...

In a town where everyone knew your name, few ever knew the truth about Vertus Hardiman. He was always sharply dressed, polite, and warm-hearted—but what no one realised was that beneath the neat wig h...

On 2 August 1993, in the sleepy village of Savona, New York, an act of violence so shocking in its brutality would forever alter the landscape of juvenile justice debates in the United States. The vic...

There are rock drummers, and then there’s John Bonham. The man would hit drums like they owned him money. Few musicians have so thoroughly redefined their instrument within a genre as he did. From the...

Zorita was more than a performer. She was an emblem of the rebellious, sensuous, and often subversive energy that defined American burlesque at its mid-century height. Clad in sequins, draped in serpe...

In 1932, Paul Strand arrived in Mexico at a pivotal moment in the country’s modern history. He did not come as a casual tourist or detached observer, but as a guest of the Mexican government—specifica...

In the quiet suburbs of St Petersburg, the image of a shawl-wrapped babushka rarely raises suspicion. Yet behind the door of one unremarkable flat in Dimitrov Street, police uncovered a story so macab...

Most people know Daryl Davis as a talented blues pianist who has played with legends like Chuck Berry and B B King. But off stage, Davis has spent the past thirty years doing something far more unexpe...

On the morning of 11 May 1996, Beck Weathers was officially declared dead. High on the slopes of Mount Everest, in freezing temperatures with winds lashing through the Himalayas, fellow climbers belie...

This series reunites vintage album covers with the locations where their original photos were taken. Photographed by Alex Bartsch, the series aligns everything perfectly to create a seamless blend of ...