Social

Sexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains. 

Richard Overy looks behind the myth of a vulnerable island defended by a small band of fighter pilots to give due credit to the courage of the redoubtable civilian population.

Kathryn Hadley joins a group of schoolteachers and police officers in an innovative project that seeks ways to better understand the Holocaust.

At a time of widespread concern about the patriotism of 'economic migrants' and political refugees, Peter Barber tells the story of one 19th-century immigrant whose affection for Britain grew as political crisis severed his attachment to home.

As the daily life of Berlin's Jews became even more difficult under the Nazi regime, rumour and hearsay grew about the fate of those 'evacuated' to the east. How much did ordinary Berliners know about the fate of their neighbours?

In early 1907 the peasants of Romania rose up against feudal laws, wealthy landowners and the agents who kept them living in penury and servitude. Markus Bauer discusses the legacy of an 'unbelievable bloodbath'.

S.M. Toyne charts the inception and development of this most quintessentially English sport.

Helen Castor visits the History Today archive to find Maurice Keen's 1959 analysis of an important collection of family letters that offer an unparalleled insight into gentry life in 15th-century England.

Bernard Lewis writes that the fall of Constantinople was no “victory of barbarism, but rather of another and not undistinguished civilization.” 

Dan Stone looks at how historians’ understanding of the Holocaust has changed since the end of the Cold War with the opening of archives that reveal the full horror of the ‘Wild East’.