Historical

T.E. Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, dies as a retired Royal Air Force mechanic living under an assumed name. The legendary war hero, author, and archaeological scholar succumbed to injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident six days before.

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Tremadoc, Wales, in 1888. In 1896, his family moved to Oxford. Lawrence studied architecture and archaeology, for which he made a trip to Ottoman (Turkish)-controlled Syria and Palestine [...]

The Rijksmuseum has acquired an extremely rare copy of the first photographically illustrated book, a compendium of British algae created and privately published by botanist Anna Atkins. The museum bought the book from a private collector for €450,000 ($500,000) with funding from the lottery and family foundations.

These were contact prints, technically photograms rather than photographs, made by placing the dried botanical specimen on cyanotype paper. The process was developed [...]

Portrait of the Author as a Historian: Svetlana Alexievich

By Alexander Lee

Attempting to recover the human experience of Communism in the post-Soviet era, a Belarusian investigative journalist found pessimistic nostalgia in place of hope for the future. ‘Communism had an insane plan', Svetlana Alexievich has claimed: to remake not just society, but humanity itself. ‘And it really worked'. After many years in [...]

Portrait of the author as a historian No. 12: Svetlana Alexievich

By Alexander Lee

Attempting to recover the human experience of Communism in the post-Soviet era, a Belarusian investigative journalist found pessimistic nostalgia in place of hope for the future. ‘Communism had an insane plan', Svetlana Alexievich has claimed: to remake not just society, but humanity itself. ‘And it really worked'. After [...]

From the Editor: Ambition style and sacrifice

By Paul Lay

The challenges that Edward Gibbon faced remain much the same for historians today. The year 238 was a turbulent one for the Roman Empire. It has become known to posterity as the Year of the Six Emperors, one of whom was Gordian II, who ruled for just one month alongside his father, Gordian I. [...]