Short Histories

A little known story of a passenger ship that sunk in the River Thames in 1878, taking over 650 people to a filthy, watery grave  more  

Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley would have struggled to break the German enigma codes without the heroic actions of three British sailors - two of whom made the ultimat...  more  

One lunchtime in January 1919, a huge molasses tank did what it had been threatening to do for years, and burst. The result was a terrifying tsunami that swept all before it and ki...  more  

When the first pitched battle of the American Civil War took place on his land, Wilmer McClean decided he ought to move with his family to somewhere safer....only to end up hosting...  more  

A love triangle between a Swiss woman, an Irishman and an Englishman led to one of Victorian Britain's most infamous murders  more  

A list of just some of the black people who arrived on these shores before 1900 and found huge success  more  

Just decades after the American and French revolutions, rebellious fervour was in the air in Britain. In February 1820, a group of British radicals came close to pulling off an aud...  more  

Life was not always so cheery for the 'Merry Monarch', who spent six weeks on the run from the people who killed his father  more  

When a British officer was kidnapped by the IRA in 1920, he probably expected to be executed. What followed was a comic tale of poker, whiskey and an unlikely friendship  more  

The Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 had many people looking back with a morbid curiosity at the infamous Black Death of the mid-14th Century. But what was the Black Death, and how can it...  more