English readings — History
300 original readings written by the FitForm team, graded B1 → C2 and sorted by topic. Reading is free and needs no account; exercises, vocabulary review and essay marking need a FitForm login.
The clock that changed work
Before mechanical clocks, a working day was measured by daylight and by tasks. A field was ploughed; a loaf…
The library of Alexandria did not burn
The story is familiar. A great library, the collected knowledge of the ancient world, destroyed in a single…
The clock and the factory
Before the eighteenth century most people did not know what time it was, and did not need to. Work followed…
The rice that came from nowhere
Between 1960 and 2000 world cereal production roughly tripled while the area farmed grew by about ten per…
The letter that was never sent
Archives contain a particular category of document that historians value more than almost any other: the…
The tax on windows
In 1696 England introduced a tax on windows. The reasoning was sensible: counting windows from the street…
The silence of the archive
A historian studying an eighteenth-century town can tell you what the magistrates decided, what the merchants…
The stamp that changed the post
Before 1840, British letters were paid for by the person who received them, and the price depended on…
The calendar that lost eleven days
When Britain changed calendars in 1752, the second of September was followed by the fourteenth. Eleven days…
The tax records that became history
Almost everything known about ordinary life in many pre-modern societies comes from documents written to…
The monument with a new plaque
A city council spent two years deciding what to do about a statue, and the eventual answer was a second…
The skeleton in the wrong grave
A skeleton excavated in 1904 was identified from a grave marker, catalogued, and used for a century as a…
The population that was estimated twice
Two respected estimates of a city's population in 1650 differ by a factor of three. Both are defensible, and…
The map that was a claim
A sixteenth-century map shows a river running west where no river runs. The cartographer had never been…
The invention of the exam
Written examinations feel as natural to students as the walls of a classroom, but they are an invention with…