All Articles

This is the story of the great Zulu chief, who led his people to victory at a time when they had given up hope. Shaka Zulu was a clever and original military thinker but he lost the love of his people when his mother died and sadness drove him crazy. (1,050 words)

Ibn Battuta left his home in (what is now) Morocco many hundreds of years ago. He wanted to go to Mecca to do Haj as a good Muslim. He did not return for more than twenty years. He could not stop travelling. (370 words)

Britain in the early eighteenth century was a land of farms and fields but the Industrial Revolution changed the country for ever. James Watt, a Scottish inventor with only a little schooling, was the man that started it all. This is his story. (620 words)

The history of hair styles is interesting because it shows us that human beings always want something different. And it is not only women that spend a lot of money on their hair. For most of history, men have also worn their hair long and spent hours on making it look beautiful and unusual. (735 words)

The doctors told Francis Chichester that he had cancer and was going to die very soon. But Chichester decided to live his life very fast and very bravely. He learnt to sail and became the first person to sail around the world on his own. (315 words)

Faraday changed the world. He understood more about electricity than anybody who ever lived. Albert Einstein had a picture of Michael Faraday on his office wall. But Faraday was born poor. He never went to university and ate in the kitchen because his boss’ wife did not want to eat with him. (495 words)

Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492 and, because of him, South America was Spanish for hundreds of years and most people still speak Spanish there today. But did you know he was Italian? And, although he made a lot of money for the Spanish king and queen, he never actually got paid himself. (400 words)

Coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the world. It was first grown in Ethiopia, which is still the home of some of the best coffee in the world. It then crossed the Red Sea into Arabia and in the eighteenth century Europe, where it led to the development of the sugar industry and stock markets. (1,155 words)

We will never forget the name of Auschwitz, the camp where Hitler and his Nazi government killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and many other people in the Second World War. This is the terrible story of one of the worst moments in human history (1020 words).

A history of architecture since human beings started to depend on it after the development of agriculture started a shift to permanent homes. It is now a very sophisticated science (and art perhaps) which affects most people's lives. (1,140 words)

We usually think of the computer as a very modern invention: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, maybe Alan Turing. However, this article takes us back two hundred years to the birth of the first calculating machine and tells the story of two very different people, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace and the parts they played in making the first computing machine. (870 words)

Starting with Galen treating gladiators in ancient Rome, on to Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey pointing out his mistakes and then to the grave robbers Burke and Hare supplying murder victims for doctors to cut open and study. Explore the story of how knowledge of human anatomy developed (680 words)

Table tennis developed when British soldiers in South Africa and India could not play tennis outside and started to use tables inside their houses. At first, they used a tennis ball and broke a lot of windows but slowly table tennis became a game with its own rules, ball and bat. (640 words)

A quick tour of the planets near and far describing the difference between planets and stars and why they keep turning around the Sun. (850 words)

People could see Mars 5,000 years ago, the Babylonians thought it was coloured red and was angry and the Romans called the god of war ‘Mars’. Modern scientists have tried to find life there but we still don’t know very much about it. (1,210 words)