Social

Two rare textile discoveries connect 18th-century Barbadian schoolgirls to England.

Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918-1941 is a tale of three cities linked by globalisation and a singular global citizen.

In The Tree Hunters: How the Cult of the Arboretum Transformed Our Landscape, Thomas Pakenham reveals the discoveries of Britain’s buccaneering botanists.

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women and God’s Own Gentlewoman bring the real world of medieval women out of the margins.

Meant to live a life of perfect peacefulness and contemplation, in reality monks were human and fallible. How violent could life in the medieval cloister be?

Uruguay was the only nation where fighting a duel in defence of honour was perfectly legal for most of the 20th century. Why?

In A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, Richard Slotkin attempts to untangle the stories that the US tells itself about race, colonialism and the Civil War. Is it a lost cause?

The acute housing crisis of mid-Victorian Britain generated stormy opinions about the nature of state intervention and the need for ‘wholesome despotism’.

Who were the female blacksmiths of medieval England? 

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492, Marcy Norton shows through Indigenous American practices and beliefs that colonisation was a catastrophe for the natural world.