North America

President William McKinley was shot at a public reception during the Pan-American Exposition in the city of Buffalo on September 6th, 1901.

Robert Poole contributes to our occasional Film in Context series, with a look at the way in which Stanley Kubrick redefined our views not only of the future, but of space itself.

Newfoundland celebrates fifty years as Canada's tenth province and remembers the Vikings arriving a thousand years earlier.

When in 1681 pirate Bartholomew Sharpe captured a Spanish ship and with it a detailed description of the west coast of the Americas, he gave English cartographers a field day and won himself an unexpected acquittal. James Kelly explains.

Simon Smith questions our image of buccaneers as bloodthirsty opportunists claiming they were often highly organised and efficient businessmen in the waters of the Caribbean.

Barbara Schreier offers a fascinating insight into how the dress, customs and attitudes of Jewish women escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe altered as part of their assimilation as Americans.

The Hudson's Bay Company was one of the central forces moulding the development of the vast tracts of land that today are Canada - but as Barry Gough explains here, the circumstances of its launch in 1670 also reveal much about the commercial forces, personalities and rivalries of Restoration England.

Aram Bakshian delves into the annexe of Presidents in Washington DC

A chip off the old block? Susan Ware looks over the careers of the Hollywood actress and her radical mother and finds reflections of the changing roles and attitudes of women in 20th-century America.