It is spring in Tokyo, but Toshiko Takagi cannot bear to see office workers sitting beneath cherry blossom in the parks that dot the Sumida district where she lives.

This year Auckland very successfully celebrated its 175th birthday. But did we celebrate on the right day?

On March 20, Napoleon Bonaparte will once more set foot on the cobbled streets of Paris, the staging point of his plan to rout his enemies and recover the empire he lost.

The Protected Objects Act plays an important role in safeguarding this country's heritage. But there will be times when the ministry should not be straitjacketed by the act.

Hundreds of thousands of German women were raped by British, American and French soldiers after the end of the Second World War, a German historian has claimed.

An exhibition about the Kiwi overseas experience shows New Zealanders have been exploring the world since the early 1900s.

The Gallipoli centennial starts on the Auckland waterfront on Friday when the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth sets up a "poppy wall" which will sail with the ship to Turkey.

Auckland and NZ have won international fame for our America's Cup and round-the-world yachtsmen. Suzanne McFadden charts the way the city and gulf have helped our sailors graduate from banana boxes to world-beaters.

There was only one thing that mildly irked Joyce Irving when she got her performance schedule for A Midsummer Night's Dream: she wouldn't appear every night.

Historians and prophets, by the nature of their vocations, tend to look in opposite directions, writes Paul Moon.

64: War-weary soldiers forgot their troubles when they saw the New Zealand Pierrots take to the stage.

Few people know just how close the Auckland Harbour Bridge came to being lost in the very body of water it was designed to span.

Spain planned to attack Britain's new colony in Australia with a 100-vessel armada as part of an operation to "take the fight to the British in the Pacific", documents show.

Opinion: The disconnect I feel on Australia Day is not a rejection of history. Rather, it is a rejection of the privileging of one version of history at the expense of another.

Jozef Paczynski recalls the "welcome" speech the deputy commandant of Auschwitz gave on his arrival in 1940, down to the last chilling word.

Philanthropist and economist Gareth Morgan has set out two challenges to the Government at his first visit to Ratana Pa.

Two companies responsible for digging up an archaeologically significant early Maori site have today been convicted and discharged by a judge.

61: Today we might call them special forces. When Robert Kenneth Nicol joined a top secret British Army unit in 1918, it was known as the "hush-hush brigade".

Pakeha nearly "exterminated" Maori and need to make good on the intent of the Treaty - including compulsory te reo in all primary schools, Gareth Morgan says.

A lost documentary Alfred Hitchcock made about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps during World War Two has finally reached screens thanks to movie mogul Brett Ratner.

Survivors who escaped the gas chambers at Auschwitz have remembered the horror of the infamous Nazi death camp 70 years after liberation by Red Army soldiers.

With now more than 10,000 descendants, the first Hansens' place in history was acknowledged at a major reunion of about 1200 family and friends in Manukau on Friday and Saturday.

Few major institutions in Auckland's history devoted 82 per cent of their staff to a war.

Auckland's oldest bank nearly fell prey to the Government's economic plans in 1870, potentially curtailing the role it would play in the rise of Auckland commerce and community.

Eerie photographs taken during Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole over a century ago have surfaced at an Auckland auction.

Seventy years ago today, a German submarine went on an unsuccessful search for ships to sink in New Zealand waters.

The surprise departure of NZ spy agency boss Ian Fletcher has prompted questions about whether he was unsettled by potential changes which could be in the pipeline.