Baron Cobham and family around the dinner table, 1567.
Master of the Countess of Warwick
During the Tudor period, religious beliefs shaped people’s attitudes towards food and food waste.
Eve – Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1510)
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The story of human evolution is inextricable from the story of gynaecology.
The Vesuvius Challenge incentivizes technological development by inviting researchers to figure out how to ‘read’ ancient papyri excavated from volcanic ash of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. Columns of Greek text retrieved from a portion of a scroll.
(Vesuvius Challenge)
However exciting the technological developments may be, the task of reading and analyzing the Greek and Latin texts recovered from the papyri will fall to human beings.
Several campaigns have been waged against statues linked to Africa’s colonial past.
Rodger Bosch/Getty Images
The fate of several colonial statues in Africa continues to be a subject of controversy.
‘The Drunkenness of Noah’ by Giovanni Bellini.
Wikimedia
For nearly 500 years, priests and imams justified slavery on the basis of a misunderstood passage of the Bible.
A photograph of the 2017 total solar eclipse, taken at the Oregon State Fair Grounds, Salem, Ore.
(Dominic Hart/NASA)
Mentions of total solar eclipses in ancient history help researchers pinpoint precise dates of notable events.
Christopher Nolan accepts the award for Best Director for ‘Oppenheimer’ during the Oscars on March 10, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif.
(AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
The success of ‘Oppenheimer’ at the Academy Awards presents an opportunity to think about critical criteria for viewing historical film — and what we are owed by historical filmmakers.
Democracy was enshrined in Roman currency.
American Numismatic Society
Fighting for voter access is an inevitable part of any democracy, from ancient Rome to the US today. Roman legislators were able to thwart elite political sway by introducing written ballots.
State Library of South Australia
I recently visited four historic houses in Victoria that are open to the public to get a better understanding of women who worked from home.
Noel Fielding in The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin.
Apple+
Not the dandy highwayman of popular imagination, Dick Turpin was a violent and, according to records, ugly criminal.
Tony Curran (centre) as James I and Nicholas Galitzine (right) as George Villiers.
Rory Mulvey/Sky UK
It was sometimes thought that men who had sex with men would give birth to monsters.
Class, gender and religion influenced health care in early modern Spain and Latin America.
Diego Velázquez/The National Gallery
Early modern societies in Latin America and Spain saw a convergence of traditional medical knowledge and the professionalization of medicine. The resulting differences in access to care endure today.
Met Museum/National Portrait Gallery
What changing artistic depictions of women’s alopecia tells us about hair loss today.
University of Iowa guard Caitlin Clark celebrates after making the game-winning shot against Michigan State on Jan. 2, 2024.
Matthew Holst/Getty Images
Before being pushed aside by the NCAA, the AIAW, which was designed for and by women, governed women’s college athletics.
Thomas Holt/Shutterstock
Being unable to agree on a united national memorial shows just how disunited Wales had been.
Shutterstock
Pope Gregory XIII was patron of Rome’s renaissance, and a legal luminary whose influence transcends the ages.
EPA/Everett Kennedy Brown
One of the earliest known references to asbestos may come from Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle and his successor at the Lyceum in Athens.
A farmer paddles to his fields on an artificial island among canals, part of an ancient Aztec system known as chinampas, in 2021.
AP Photo/Marco Ugarte
Agricultural sustainability is as much about power and sovereignty as it is about soil, water and crops.
Police find bog body dated over 2,000 years in Bellaghy.
Police Service of Northern Ireland
The bog does not neatly divide traces of the distant and recent past. Archaeology and forensic science still have much to learn from each other.
Justin Lane/AAP
Conservative critics argue the ‘social responsibility’ of business lies in increasing profits. But values have always been tied up with money-making, from the welfare state to colonialism.