Political

What was the Great Reform Act of 1832, how did it come about and what, if anything, did it achieve? Stephen Farrell looks at the people and politics involved.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo was founded on June 30th, 1960. Within a few days, however, there were army mutinies and disturbances around the country.

Coalition governments became common in 18th-century Britain, but tended to fail at times of crisis. Jeremy Black draws some parallels with the present day.

Before the First World War, Irish Unionists and Nationalists were poised to fight each other over the imposition of Home Rule by the British. Then, remarkably, they fought and died side by side, writes Richard S. Grayson.

Objects loaded with the history of the Troubles are scattered around Belfast, but sensitivity means the debate about how and where to exhibit them rumbles on, says James Morrison.

In 1959 Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba after a masterly campaign of guerrilla warfare. Drawing on this success, Castro and his followers, including Che Guevara, sought to spread their revolution, as Clive Foss explains.

Nancy Mitford finds that Carlyle’s biography of the King was one of the oddest ever written, but it is ‘so carefully drawn that it finally presents a perfect likeness’.

Diana Spearman explains the deep complexities of the pre-Victorian political landscape and electoral system in Britain. Ben Wilson offered his own historiographical perspective in this 2010 article.