Stories from the collection

After six years of brutal global conflict, this document marked the end of the Second World War.

The oldest complete document at The National Archives, this charter recording a grant of land dates back over 1,000 years.

In 1938, thanks to years of work by a remarkable female agent, MI5 ensured a package of British defence plans stayed secret.

This is the nationality certificate of Ambalavaner Sivanandan (1923–2018), the novelist, activist and former director of the Institute of Race Relations.

The 1951 Refugee Convention defined international obligations to refugees, but also exposed global tensions in a context of decolonisation and ongoing conflict.

Anne Lister and Ann Walker's romantic relationship defied societal norms of their time, as we can encounter through the archival material they left behind.

The book Spycatcher sparked one of the most controversial courtroom battles of the 1980s, bringing questions around state secrecy to a global audience.

This report provides an eyewitness account of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the Second World War.

This volume offers a glimpse of the numerous ‘Black Loyalists’ who seized the American Revolutionary War as a chance to gain freedom from enslavement.

This MI5 assessment highlights some of German leader Adolf Hitler’s feelings towards the United Kingdom in 1938 – including (allegedly) using a swear word.

These intricate 1716 drawings were submitted by Sybilla Masters in the final stage of securing a patent for machinery for 'cleaning and curing Indian corn'.

The government tried to keep the details of the Bethnal Green Tube shelter disaster of 1943 private – but a court case brought the terrible story to light.