In the lore of Jolly Roger movies, Disneyland and Long John Silver, pirates were drunken, peg-legged bandits who made captives walk the plank and eat their own ears. Now historians are taking a second ...

Once the herald of Blackbeards and Jack Sparrows, the Jolly Roger is now being used by protesters as a symbol of justice and freedom Pirates, ahoy! You may be visualising RL Stevenson's Treasure ...

When the USS Jimmy Carter sailed into its home port in Washington state in September 2017, it was flying an unusual flag: the distinctive skull and crossbones of a Jolly Roger. There’s no telling ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Gen Z protests swept the world this year, pushing for political change in countries from Turkey and Indonesia ...

There have been a number of different explanations of the origin of the most famous of the pirates’ flags: the ‘skull and cross bones’, which was first used around the year 1700. In the book Socialism ...