Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon, England (1088-1154) has been admired for centuries as the author of the monumental "Historia Anglorum". The recent discovery of the Anglicanus ortus opens a new window onto this important English author as well as ont...

Many important and valuable manuscripts, rare books, and artefacts related to Korea have been acquired by donations throughout the long history of the Bodleian Library and the museums of the University of Oxford. However, due to an early lack of spec...

The process of secularization, which is one of the sources of present-day democracy, has its radical origins in eighteenth-century Europe. Criticism of religious norms and discipline, institutions and ideology led to the movement known as the Enlight...

Using fascinating printed documents that have survived by chance, a new book, released on Empire Day, vividly tells the story of the British Empire from the unusual angle of a unique collection of over 200 images of everyday life ephemera, many of wh...

William Wey, fifteenth-century Devon priest, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and Bursar of Eton College, made three pilgrimages between 1456 and 1462 – to Compostella, Rome and the Holy Land. The complete text of his narrative has never before been...

"I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and if necessary to carry it" – Adolph Hitler, 16 July 1940. Immediately after the fall of France in June 1940, Hitler ordered his generals to organize the invasion of Britain under a pl...

Nine-and-a-half months after D-Day, 30,000 British troops crossed the Rhine as part of the Allied assault on Germany. Two years earlier, work had already started on a guide to assist them in negotiating everyday life in what then was still enemy terr...

Hugh Crow was the captain of a slave-trading vessel which made one of the last legal journeys across the Atlantic with its "human cargo". This is a highly engaging, rare, first-hand account written by a staunch defender of the slave trade. Crow depic...

At the height of the debate about the slave trade and its abolition in the 1780s and '90s, each side issued pamphlets in support of its position. This publication reproduces a selection of representative pamphlets encompassing the arguments put forwa...

Nearly 1 million American soldiers passed through Australia between 1942 and 1945 as part of America's strategy to recapture the Philippines and defeat Japan. They encountered a country full of reassuring similarities and strange differences. Here wa...