Terms of use

You are welcome to read it, link to it, quote it with attribution, and use it in teaching. Please do not copy it wholesale onto another site, and do not present its writing as your own.

The historical text was written for this site and belongs to it. Short quotations with a link back are fine without asking.

The photographs are not ours to license. Each one is used under its own licence, and each is shown with its author, its licence and a link to where it came from. If you want to reuse a photograph, follow the terms of that licence rather than these terms. The full list is on the image credits page.

The history here is written carefully and marked where it is uncertain or disputed, but it is a summary and it can be wrong. It is not offered as a legal, political or scholarly authority, and it should not be the only thing you rely on. Corrections are welcome and are acted on.

The site is provided as it is, without a promise that it will always be available or free of errors.

Links to books, licences and photograph sources point at sites nobody here controls, and linking to them is not an endorsement of anything else on them.

These terms may change as the site does. The date at the top of this page is when they last changed. The address for anything in them is [email protected].