The sociologist Edward Shils said or wrote somewhere that one of the three principle means of education were bookstorespreferably a used bookstore. Shils, for two generations a student and then facul

Britain in the 1840s should have been, observes Simon Heffer, a time of great social improvement. Instead it was a country that was beset by poverty, unrest, assassination attempts on young Queen Vict

In 1814, representatives of the grand coalition that had defeated Napoleon gathered in Vienna. There in meetings and ballsinterrupted only by Napoleons 100 days after his return from exile on Elbat

On the coast of Greece there is an ancient monument that no-one pays very much attention to; and yet it marks one of the most consequential battles in the history of Rome, or really all of Europe. It

On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey was hung for attempting to lead a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina. Also executed that day were five of his supporters. Over the next month, a total of 35 men

In 1871 an expedition entered the territory now encompassed by Yellowstone National Park. Led by doctor and self-taught geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, it was to be the first scientific expediti

The story of beer, writes John Arthur, is a chronicle about how we as a species have interacted with each other, created prosperous societies, survived difficult and challenging times, and ended up

From the first weeks of the Great War, in August 1914, medical practice was overwhelmed, not simply by the mass casualties produced by the war, but the types of trauma to which human bodies were being

My underlying goal, writes my guest Tom Misa, has been to display the variety of technologies, to describe how they changed across time, and to understand how they interacted with diverse societies

Grain traders wandering across the steppe; boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It's all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it