Pen And Sword History imprint: 193 books

What was life like in the Victorian underworld – who were the criminals, what crimes did they commit, how did they come to a criminal career, and what happened to them after they were released from prison? Victorian Convicts, by telling the stories of a hundred criminal men and women, gives the...

In the years leading up to the First World War, the United Kingdom was subjected to a ferocious campaign of bombing and arson. Those conducting this terrorist offensive were members of the Women's Social and Political Union; better known as the suffragettes. 

The targets for their attacks ranged...

The intriguing characters in these real family history mysteries include an agricultural labourer who left secrets behind in Somerset when he migrated to Manchester, a working-class woman who bafflingly lost ten of her fourteen children in infancy, a miner who purportedly went to ‘live with the...

Over a period of more than 150 years between the late eighteenth century and the 1930s the South Yorkshire rural landscape was transformed by coal mining and the movement of coal. But it was not just the development of collieries, canals and railways that caused this transformation. The population...

Just hearing the phrase ‘the East End’ summons up images of slums and dark alleyways, with Jack the Ripper appearing from the mist, or housing estates and pubs where you might find the Kray twins. It is a place of poverty and menace, yet these images can prevent us from seeing the reality of life...

We are all familiar with the digital revolution that has swept across the developed world in recent years. It has ushered in an age of smartphones, laptop computers and ready access to the internet. A little over a century ago, a similar explosion took place in the field of information and communication...

Life in wartime London evokes images of the Blitz, of air-raid shelters and rationing, of billeted soldiers and evacuated children. These are familiar, collective memories of what life was like in wartime London, yet there remains an often neglected area of our social history: what was life like for...

The gradual growth of the railways in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in both passenger and freight traffic, saw the requirement for a more powerful and versatile type of motive power – mixed traffic locomotives. The construction of Great Western Halls and Modified...

What was life like for the Victorian bobby? Gaynor Haliday became fascinated with the history of the early police forces when researching the life of her great-great-grandfather; a well-regarded, long-suffering Victorian police constable in Bradford. Although a citation claimed his style of policing...

On 11 October 1492 the sun set on a clear Atlantic Ocean horizon and the night was cloudless with a late rising moon. As the lookouts high in the riggings of Christopher Columbus’ three ships strained their eyes into the golden light of the moon, near two o’clock in the morning the watchman on...

Almost all of us have happy memories of excursions and holidays spent beside the sea. For many, these will have included the Yorkshire coast which runs unbroken for more than one hundred miles between the two great rivers, the Tees and the Humber. Within those boundaries are the popular seaside resorts...

‘Smoke rises in the City of Three Spires, the smouldering remnant of the Nazi hate. Coventry and England will remember and repay’. From August 1940, Hitler’s Luftwaffe mercilessly and indiscriminately bombed cities and towns in Britain. The historic West Midlands city of Coventry did...

Merseyside has a long and varied history, one which its sons and daughters are justifiably proud. It has come through many struggles, but perhaps its darkest hour was the air raids that were launched against it in 1940 and 1941\. Around 4,000 people lost their lives and many prominent buildings and...

'The stories of those who lived in the shadow of the workhouse'

During the nineteenth century the workhouse cast a shadow over the lives of the poor. The destitute and the desperate sought refuge within its forbidding walls. And it was an ever-present threat if poor families failed to look after...