When one thinks of the warships that fought the First World War, images of colossal dreadnoughts and great armoured cruisers immediately spring to mind, battling for supremacy at Jutland, Coronel, or ...

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the heavens were regarded as the arbiter of human health. The movements of the planets and the positions of the zodiac signs were believed to exert a direct i...

HBO’s Band of Brothers is considered to be one of the most beloved and acclaimed miniseries of all time.

Today Noor Inayat Khan is commemorated in films, books, and memorials. Yet, despite the growing recognition of her role as a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent during the Second World War, she r...

The First Crusade (1096-1099), commissioned by Pope Urban II in 1095 to save the Eastern Churches, was the official premise of the Crusading movement at its inception.

How does one express overwhelming rage or give voice to inconsolable grief? Sometimes, there are not enough words.

When Barr Spangler died in September 1922, he left behind a remarkable record.

The above quote comes from a German woman living in England, interviewed in March 2025 about her experiences of living in Britain, tearfully admitting that her teenage sons had been branded as Nazis a...

My Creative Writing PhD combines a work of fiction with traditional academics. The primary component is a historical novel titled Twice Forgotten – the story follows the relationship William Strahan a...

In her work Putafeminista (2018), Monique Prada reflects on where feminism fits into sex worker activists’ struggle in Brazil, and vice versa.

Racial violence, inequality and prejudice are just some of the issues brought to the fore by movements such as Black Lives Matter. Beneath t

The latter stages of the First World War and its immediate aftermath saw the focus of some policy-makers shift to the question of changing

Castrated or celebrated? Few identities challenge our assumptions about power and the body as much as that of the Byzantine eunuch.

Call the Midwife, BBC’s Sunday night guilty pleasure, has a secret radicalism at its core.

What if capitalism is not simply a system human beings created, but a process that increasingly treats human beings as instruments of its own expansion? That unsettling possibility lies near the centr...

As the autumn chill set in, in 1914, the Lahore division of the British Indian Army moved into Flanders. They had sailed from Bombay in Augu

On August 7, 1964,  Private Eye, an emerging satirical cartoon magazine published this cover. Drawn by Gerald Scarfe, ex-Punch cartoonist, it unintentionally marked the end of an era in caricature.

Myth and identity in the ancient world were often intimately connected; the stories communities shared could reflect their ideas of self...

During the era of the transatlantic trade in enslaved peoples, abolitionist writers and activists condemned the cruelty of the barbaric practice of slavery.

My dear Mary Hitthaler! One like you is not easy to find. I can talk with you German-Ladin ...

Sugar, vegetable oil, flour, and vanilla extract… followed by the conspicuous whirring of a hand mixer: just another somewhat hectic morning making some traditional Malaysian kuih bahulu - essentially...

In the somewhat alien verse and prose of early modern plays, a beginning reader may find themselves remembering not the moving speeches nor contemporaneous jokes, but the rude parts that made them lau...

In the somewhat alien verse and prose of early modern plays, a beginning reader may find themselves remembering not the moving speeches nor contemporaneous jokes, but the rude parts that made them lau...

On June 1st 1826 the Lang collection of registers records the marriage of Alexander McCully and Eleanor Forsythe at Gretna Green; no witness

Elisabeth Crowfoot (1914-2005) was the author of Textiles and Clothing: c.1150-c.1450, a book compiling and analysing medieval textiles and clothing from archaeological digs in London.

With her resolve hanging by a thread, Britain’s conflict with Germany in 1915 had evolved from a mobile war to a stalemate characterised by attritional trench fighting, the use of poison gas, doomed o...

Try this on for size, sir: one black shirt partly buttoned up, black trousers, black ballroom shoes.

On a darkened London street, in the winter of 1942, fear travelled faster than any visible threat. Doors were bolted earlier, footsteps quickened, and strangers were regarded with suspicion.

The Venerable Bede (c.627/3– 735) depicts the moment in 710 CE when Nechtan III, king of Pictland (what is now northern and eastern Scotland) accepted Abbot Ceolfrith’s lengthy arguments in favour of ...

The Saga of Grettir the Strong, mostly set in Iceland during the 1000 and 1100s CE, opens with descriptions of a violent sea-battle in Norway.

If, like me, you enjoy nothing more than watching a period drama, whether it’s the new Peaky Blinders or Foyle’s War, you will have seen that costume signals differences between British social classes...

By the turn of the twentieth century, the occult had become one of Britain’s most compelling cultural obsessions, so long as it remained at a safe distance.

EPOCH Editors Aimée Wilkinson and Josh Coulthard sat down with Dr. Linda Fibiger, Senior Lecturer in Human Osteoarchaeology at the University of Edinburgh, to discuss her recently published article ab...

On 13th of February 1939, Mrs Annie Wranowsky entered the German Embassy in London to collect her renewed passport, blissfully unaware of th

In the early modern period, public anatomy lessons, though originally aimed at students, were both scientific endeavours and social spectacl

The lyrics to Matt McGinn’s Jeely Piece Song satirize the new domestic experiences that council housebuilding offered to the former slum

These were the words of Lakay Latundan, a despondent Ayta, as he requested to be reunited with his home before the devastation of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption ended his life among many others.

Nose art, a popular practice amongst flying personnel in the Second World War, is part of a long tradition of modifying and personalising we

Finding his people 'misusing the law', Hywel Dda, King of all Wales, summoned the realm’s wisest men to an assembly.

Anyone who loves historical dramas or books has encountered the fictional Christopher Marlowe at least once [...] a very attractive enigma

Post-war Britain in the 1920s and 1930s was tragically unprepared for the integration of traumatised and brutalised veterans into civilian life.

In 1916, an armed rebellion designed to rid Ireland of British rule erupted on the streets of Dublin. Ireland had been granted a limited fo

Snow closed over the trail almost as soon as Pippin fled. The winter of late 831 was, as Louis’ biographer, known as the Astronomer, put it, ‘very harsh and inclement’, and the imperial army could not...