David Rundle looks at the current state of the humanities, asking whether we can recapture the confidence and broad cultural ambition of the Renaissance’s studia humanitatis, which sought to define what it is to be human.
Though we share a common humanity with people of the past, their world can seem alien to us, says Mathew Lyons. Was it just as disconcerting for them, too?
David Gentilcore describes responses to a hideous epidemic that affected the rural poor of northern Italy, from the mid-18th century until the First World War, the cause of which is attributed to a diet dependent on maize.
Jad Adams considers the actions of the militant British suffragette movement and its far-reaching impact on the global struggle for female suffrage in the 20th century.
In the early days of the First World War a plan was hatched in Berlin to spread revolt among the Muslim populations of the Entente empires. David Motadel looks at the reasons why it failed.
Glenda Sluga explains the influence of a remarkable group of women as Europe’s elite gathered in Vienna in 1814.
Stella Ghervas examines the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the Great Powers’ attempt to create a new European order following the defeat of Napoleon.
Patricia Rothman celebrates the 200th anniversary of the birth of the brilliant James Joseph Sylvester, whose ambitions to be recognised as a professional mathematician were hindered by the religious restrictions of the age.
Roger Moorhouse tells the story of the Lützow, a partly built German cruiser delivered to the Soviet Union in 1940 and renamed the Petropavlovsk, following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
William Brooke Joyce took to the airwaves on 14 September 1939.
