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New hair, same me

Curiosity must come with respect.

Fake news and the flu

Discover how history shows that fake news could play a deadly role – by generating potentially lethal misinformation during a future pandemic.

Why pandemic denial is nothing new

Could today’s Covid-deniers be taking lessons from history? After all, it’s nearly 200 years since frustrations at a cholera-induced lockdown erupted in Sunderland.

Is fake news killing fictive art?

Parafictional artists create projects where the imaginary interacts with real life. But the growth of so-called ‘fake news’ is providing a new challenge.

Fake news in the 17th century

An uncanny resemblance to today’s Twitter tiffs characterises a 17th-century argument about demons. Read what happened when the printing presses went into overdrive.

WhatsApp aunties and the spread of fake news

The advantages of WhatApp chat groups – especially as a cost-free way of keeping in touch with family around the world – make them fertile ground for the spread of bogus medical advice. Writer Rianna Walcott explores how to encourage ‘aunties’ in the community to question the truth of unattributed health hoaxes.

“Each day brought a new obstacle I hadn’t considered”

I'm a 25-year-old autistic artist from Manchester. I have just moved from my first home away from my parents to a new apartment.

The cook who became a pariah

New York, 1907. Mary Mallon spreads infection, unaware that her name will one day become synonymous with typhoid.

The white tears of Taranaki

Taranaki in Aotearoa, New Zealand, is home to the world’s largest dairy factory. Sarah Hopkinson questions the price paid by an area dominated by monoculture.

The tradesman who confronted the pestilence

The City of London, 1665. As the Great Plague hits the capital, John New faces a deadly dilemma.

The stranger who started an epidemic

New Orleans, 1853. James McGuigan arrives in the port city and succumbs to yellow fever.

Rose Mackenberg’s deceptive activism

Discover how a New York private investigator became part of Houdini’s mission to expose the fraudulent mediums making money from their vulnerable, grieving clients.

From cacao to chocolate

Discover how chocolate morphed from a prized, spiritually significant commodity to a quasi-medicine, and finally to the sweet treat we eat almost daily.

姜、蒜、葱 Ginger, garlic and spring onions

Nina Mingya Powles felt adrift in the UK, living thousands of miles from home. But nurturing familiar tastes and smells in her tiny balcony garden helped her roots begin to grow.

The island of unclaimed bodies

In New York, those who live and die on the extreme edges of society are buried on an isolated island, often forgotten and unmourned. But recent legal changes aim to reduce stigma and restore their dignity.

The history of brainwashing

Is it possible to control what other people think? In this abridged extract from his book ‘Brainwashed’, psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick offers us a new history of thought control.

Guilty chimneys and the threat to the air we breathe

Industrialisation brought visibly polluted air to the world’s cities, captured in various media from the 1800s. Angela Saward explores the methods used, and the messages the images conveyed.

Electric marvels in the age of enlightenment

How our understanding of electricity has grown, from novelty to the pulse of modern life – and the inner fire that powers the human machine.

The father of handwashing

Doctors performing autopsies and then delivering babies – with not a hint of soap in between – was the grim recipe producing a lot of motherless offspring in the 1800s. But one man’s gargantuan efforts to upend accepted medical thinking turned the tide.

Conflicted and confused about lithium

Covid-19 left Laura Grace Simpkins out of work and living back with her parents. She now had time to restart her research into her medication, but was she mad to continue?

Titans in the landscape

Dazzling luxury

As the 20th century dawned, both elite and masses basked in the marvellous and unearthly glow of the new electric illumination.

How the Peckham Experiment inspired my fiction

Find out how an unruly mass of archive material from a 1930s radical health centre has inspired brand new writing.

Disturbed minds and disruptive bodies

Prison officers tried to regulate women’s minds and bodies and maintain a new disciplinary routine in the second half of the 1800s.

How to handle your period: ten pieces of (bad) advice from history

Period pains are nothing new. Nor are innovative suggestions for how to deal with them.