Social

As Late Imperial China sought to rebuild as a modern state from the ashes of war, a new national post office was born.

A tool for tyrants... or their undoing? The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages by Shane Bobrycki crafts a history for the medieval mob.

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’.