Pen Sword History imprint: 259 books

Life in the Victorian Asylum reconstructs the lost world of the nineteenth century public asylums. This fresh take on the history of mental health reveals why county asylums were built, the sort of people they housed and the treatments they received, as well as the enduring legacy of these remarkable...

The remarkable life and culinary career of the Martha Stewart of World War–era Britain. Dorothy Peel played a key role in creating wartime recipes for householders and was awarded an OBE in 1918 for services to the Ministry of Food. In this fascinating book, Vicky Straker explores the social...

Houdini and beyond: a historic magical mystery tour of the great showmen who inspired the likes of David Blaine, Penn & Teller, and Siegfried & Roy.   Today, Harry Houdini stands as the most famous illusionist and escape artist in history. But from the late nineteenth century to early twentieth...

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...

'Germany wasn't really a place for settling in, because after the war it was pretty devastated, and there wasn't really a chance to start again, so I thought Id come to England. It was a case of people between 18 and 50 and you had to be fit because it was mainly physical work. For men, it was mines...

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...

In 1850, the population of Bradford was 103,000, having soared from 34,000 just ten years earlier. The town was on the cusp of worldwide fame as, over the coming decades, it would grow to become the wool capital of the world. Struggle and Suffrage in Bradford explores what it was like to be...

The true stories of eleven notorious women, across five centuries, who were feared, victimized, and condemned for witchcraft in the British Isles. Beginning with the late Middle Ages—from Ireland to Hampshire—hundreds of women were accused of spellcasting, wicked seduction, murder, and...

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...

**Pointing persistently to heaven: A guide to UK cathedrals** Power, glory, bloodshed, prayer: cathedrals in the UK are as much about human drama as spiritual sanctuary, as much about political wrangling as religious fervor. From Christian beginnings in the Middle Ages through Reformation,...

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...

In March 1917, the first women to be enrolled into the British Army joined the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). The women substituted men in roles that the Army considered suitable, thereby freeing men to move up the line. The WAACs served, for example, as cooks, drivers, signallers,...