In Gladiator, director Ridley Scott created a swords-and-sandals epic that was half-history and half-fiction, and that ...

Lauren Good is the digital content producer at HistoryExtra. She joined the team in 2022 after completing an MA in Creative ...

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 ...

The earthquake that hit Lisbon in 1755 was one of the deadliest in history. The Portuguese capital was almost completely destroyed, and some estimates put the death toll at 100,000 people. Later, the ...

Did you know the Sovereign is one of the world’s oldest coins still in production today? In fact, Sovereign coins were first struck for Tudor kings more than 500 years ago, before the modern version ...

Flowing hair and thick beard; heaving muscles that seem to fizz with electricity; and a thunderbolt clasped in one hand while he sits on a throne or stands on a mountaintop. That tends to be the ...

History, Mark Twain is said to have declared, doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. As Democrat and current vice president Kamala Harris and Republican former president Donald Trump run for ...

Halloween’s roots lie in the ancient festival Samhain. Celebrated on the evening of 31 October and into 1 November, Celts believed this was when the boundary between the living and the dead was at its ...

Handlebars, pencils, horseshoes, Van Dykes – there have been many different types of moustaches through history, and in November, many men grow their facial hair in aid of good causes. Facial hair is ...

It might seem astonishing that so much political energy could be consumed by what came to be known as the Petticoat Affair, which began in 1829 when members of Andrew Jackson’s cabinet and their wives ...