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It’s 1841 and Josiah Mister is on trial in Shrewsbury for attempted murder – committed at the Angel Inn in Ludlow.The victim was William Mackreth, a trader from Bristol who was in the town for the summer fair. In the early hours of the morning, he was brutally attacked by someone who’d been hiding under his bed. He managed to fight him off and his assailant escaped; a trail of blood led to Josiah’s room and he was arrested.But did…

On 31 July 1910, Hawley Harvey Crippen, better known as Dr Crippen, and Ethel Le Neve, his typist-turned-lover, were arrested on board the Montrose while trying to flee west to Canada. On top of being a sensational case and arrest, it was the first example of an arrest aided by wireless telegraphy.A cross-Atlantic chase of a fleeing couple is an apt ending to our July theme of travel and migration. When you ask yourself why your ancestor or the subject of…

Space RaceThe Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States experienced a significant ratcheting up at the end of the 1950s with the Sputnik Crisis, which saw the successful launching and orbit of the satellite Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union in 1957. This development was a key factor in the creation of NASA the following year by the United States as well as the investment of federal funds into national security and research and development.An important milestone…

It’s hard to believe, but The British Newspaper Archive has now reached the grand old age of three. We launched on 29 November 2011 with 4 million fully searchable historic newspaper pages and have come a long way since then.Please click the image to enlarge itA treasure trove of informationYou can now search more than 9 million pages, from over 300 British and Irish newspaper titles, spanning 1710-1954. Reading all of those pages would be no mean feat – we’ve estimated that it would…