Social

The acute housing crisis of mid-Victorian Britain generated stormy opinions about the nature of state intervention and the need for ‘wholesome despotism’.

Who were the female blacksmiths of medieval England? 

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492, Marcy Norton shows through Indigenous American practices and beliefs that colonisation was a catastrophe for the natural world.

Rumours about the sexual proclivities of King William III began to spread as soon as he took the English throne. What went on behind the closed doors of the royal court had implications for the nation.

Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes follows the reinvention of the cat from working animal to purrfect pet.

Despite their reputation, London’s private members’ clubs have never been entirely for men.

An old-fashioned feature of a fusty, inegalitarian past, when did the British stop knowing their place?

Wills in early modern England tell us much more than simply who left what to whom, and should not be discarded lightly.

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce is a tender study of European rural life. But is this lost past closer than we think?

In Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain, Judith Flanders explores the commercialisation of grief and those who resisted the era’s conspicuous consumption.