Social

From Stubbes' angry Anatomie of Abuses, Sydney Carter unveils a revealing portrait of Elizabethan fashions and pastimes, from high-heeled shoes to football, and from ruffs to dicing and dancing.

The observations of Edmond Geraud, a schoolboy pursuing his studies in Paris, throw fresh light on the stormiest years of the French Revolution.

Judith Flanders applauds Jerry White’s analysis of poverty in North London, first published in History Today in 1981.

Since the 1980s the American family has evolved towards greater diversity and complexity. Yet, paradoxically, it is the essentially conservative nuclear family forged in the 1950s that continues to hold sway as a touchstone in US politics and culture, says Tim Stanley.

Hanoverian precedents for the wayward behaviour of royal younger brothers.

In our final round up of histories of the nations that make up the British Isles – or, if you prefer, the Atlantic Archipelago – Maria Luddy examines an event which shaped 20th-century Ireland, the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising.

Jane Everson highlights the social networks of the Italian academies, the first of their kind in Renaissance Europe.

Robert Colls asks what British identity is - and what it is not.

Jos Damen tells the stories of two unusual men who lived a century apart in the Dutch colony at Elmina in West Africa; a poet who became a tax inspector and a former slave who argued that slavery did not contradict ideas of Christian freedom.

England has been conflated with Britain for so long that unravelling English history from that of its Celtic neighbours is a difficult task. Paul Lay considers recent histories of England and its people.