The case of a planned Cumbrian coalmine shows how governments around the world are being threatened by litigation in shadowy offshore courts, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

YouTube video by Schools History Project

Shumeet Banerji was away during crucial discussions that led to resignation of director general and BBC News chief

In November 2025, the Society joins with partners the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and publisher DC Thomson to launch a new Applied History Fellowship programme to support recent post-doctor...

On 21 November, the Society was delighted to welcome Professor Jane Ohlmeyer to give the 2025 RHS Anniversary Lecture: ‘Visible | Invisible: Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland’. Jane's lecture in...

A new study looks at how the mouth-on-mouth smooch came into being, and concludes that Neanderthals also kissed.

The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Shabana Mahmood to unveil new proposals modelled on Denmark’s controversial system

YouTube video by Schools History Project

A kayak and gloves are among the items being sent back to Canada after 100 years in a Vatican museum.

The legacy of this pivotal event in Black history continues to echo across countries and generations with its call for unity

Historian Josephine Quinn explores how the Phoenicians and their great colony, Carthage, built a maritime empire that once overshadowed both Greece and Rome

Growing demand from the British timber market led loggers to push deep into Algonquin territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, and tens of thousands of agricultural settlers followed suit. While the Algonquin faced unrelenting pressures from the timber industry and agricultural settlement, colonial governments representing the Crown failed to negotiate the acquisition of Indigenous land as required under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Using expanded timber ship immigration data from 1817 to 1839, as well as agricultural census manuscripts, we reappraise how timber extractivism operated in conjunction with settler colonialism to dispossess the Algonquin in the Ottawa Valley. Our case study, which focuses on Westmeath Township, demonstrates the interconnected processes that prioritized and enabled thousands of settlers to transform remote, unceded land into a neo-European landscape, effectively “un-making” Algonquin space in a short period of time. Settlers followed the timber roads up the Ottawa Valley beyond the Rocher Fendu Rapids in the 1830s and 1840s, drawn in part by the high prices paid by timber camps for oats and hay. Farmers extended the ecological transformation of the regions begun by the loggers, clearing forests to establish permanent farms above the rapids. Timber extractivism and settler colonialism fed one into the other as the logging camps provided labour opportunities and a market for animal feed, timber ships provided cheap passage, and settlers provided food and labour.

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