Political

Mary Tudor and the Re-Catholicisation of England

Has our image of Henry VIII's elder daughter as 'Bloody Mary', burning Protestants and unhappily married to Philip of Spain, clouded our assessment of how close she came to restoring the old religion?

'American All': Reforging a National Brotherhood, 1876-1917

Cecilia O'Leary looks at how national identity was repaired following the fratricidal traumas of the American Civil War.

Good Friends and Brothers? Francis I and Henry VIII

Glenn Richardson profiles the French king's relationship with Henry VIII and the cultural PR and diplomacy that went with it.

Beaverbrook - Sickert's 'Political Portrait'

Richard Shone looks at the foray into portraiture of a leading British artist and reflects on the tensions of painter-patron relations in the cultural climate of 1930s Britain.

Theory and Practice: Democracy and the Philosophers

Can democracy, past or present, benefit from the ministrations of the philosophers? Benjamin Barber observes the claim that Plato's persona of Socrates is a democratic one.

Splitting Images: Communication in Classical Athens

E. Hall looks at the methods used in ancient Greece to court public opinion in the light of the modern media and messages of democratic politics today.

Senators Thomas J. Walsh (Montana) and Pat Harrison (Mississippi) on the podium at the Democratic National Convention, New York, 25 June 1924. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

‘Snarling Roughhouse’: The 1924 Democratic Convention

A 17-day political dogfight at the 1924 Democratic National Convention revealed the faultlines in American society, from prohibition to Protestantism to the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Democratic Development of the former Soviet Union

Bill Wallace looks at the mixed inheritance of democratic ideas in Mother Russia and beyond as possible auguries for the future of the regimes that have succeeded the Soviet Union.