A strange day.
Shutterstock
Without them, June would soon fall in winter.
The Crusades evoke a romantic image of medieval knights, chivalry, romance and religious high-mindedness.
David Wise/Flickr
Representing even the Crusades as wars between Christians and Muslims is a gross oversimplification and a misreading of history.
Secular Meat, 2016, Sajan Mani.
Courtesy Diptej Vernekar
Faced with fake history, Indian artists are digging up the past.
Ruth Black/Shutterstock
It’s been a long, slow decline, so can anyone solve the Great British cuppa crisis?
© MGM
With Vikings on trend, it’s high time for a masterclass on the bizarre world of their names.
A Harper’s Weekly cartoon of German emigrants boarding a steamer in Hamburg, Germany, 1874.
Wikipedia
Anti-migrant rhetoric is running high in the US – but its star proponent would do well to think about his German roots.
Topsy-turvy, inside-out.
© Sarah Nicholls
Is this the future of the piano?
New York Fashion Week has grown from its humble second world war roots into a cultural juggernaut.
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
New York Fashion week starts today and the world will watch outrageous designs strut down the runway. How did New York become one of the great fashion centres of the modern world?
Joe Louis and Neil Scott help Isaac Woodard up a set a stairs soon after a beating left him blind.
Ossie Leviness/New York Daily News
In 1946, a horrific beating left a Black World War II vet blind. His determined fight for justice would earn the support of Orson Welles, Woody Guthrie – and even the president.
Suffragette Vida Goldstein became the first Australian to meet an American president at the White House.
NLA
Australia’s inimitability with regard to women’s political equality has barely entered conventional studies of political history.
Basar/Shutterstock.com
Are you an extrovert or an introvert? The answer’s just a tick away.
It is hard to imagine what a partitioned Syria would look like.
Reuters/Omar Sanadiki
There is no guarantee that a partitioned Syria would create a more stable environment. Many Syrians would reject partition and would attempt to reverse it.
Protector in chief: Theodore Roosevelt with conservationist John Muir at Yosemite in 1906.
U.S. Library of Congress
Historically, environmental causes enjoyed bipartisan support but gains by NGOs and the emergence of climate change as a social issue have created a sharp political divide.
The grave of Cecil John Rhodes in Zimbabwe’s Matopos Hills.
Susan E Adams/flickr.com
Why Oriel College Oxford was right not to agree to take down a statue of the British imperalist.
A ‘flat-Earth’ map drawn by Orlando Ferguson in 1893. This rendering of a flat Earth still gets some truck today.
Wikimedia/Orlando Ferguson
We often hear that most people throughout history believed the world was flat. But that’s not entirely true.
Are today’s politicians more cynical and power-hungry than their predecessors?
AAP/Sam Mooy
Governing was not meant to be easy. It never has been either.
Entrance to the gate of Nimrod, destroyed by the IS group and digitally reconstructed as part of Project Mosul.
Model by ruimx from photos at projectmosul.org
Researchers are making 3D scans, architectural plans and detailed photographic records of cultural heritage sites around the world, knowing they could be destroyed at any time.
An exhibition about France’s long history in Algeria.
Philippe Wojazer/Reuters
France’s colonial legacy remains an uncomfortable subject.
In the late 19th century, three brothers from New Hampshire drew uniforms for the military troops of their imaginary world.
Amherst College
One historian is plumbing the oft-discarded works of kids – from shipwreck tales to diary entries – to augment our understanding of U.S. history.
Reuters/Michael Dalder
Printers have been overwhelmed with orders for the first edition of the text to be published in Germany since 1945.