Social

Britain has had a long and sometimes problematic relationship with alcohol. James Nicholls looks back over five centuries to examine the many, often unsuccessful, attempts to reform the nation’s drinking habits.

John Spiller surveys race relations in the United States during Reconstruction and constructs a balance sheet.

Simon Lemieux examines examples of German Protestant propaganda.

For centuries, Africans were shipped to the Indian subcontinent and sold as slaves to regional rulers. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of those who went to Lucknow to serve the Nawab of Oudh and who joined the Indian Mutiny when he was deposed by the British. For this allegiance their descendants, whom she has traced, still pay a price.

The messages sent by British soldiers of the First World War to their loved ones back home have long been valued for what they tell us about daily life in the trenches. But their authors were often at pains not to reveal too much of the horror they endured. Anthony Fletcher considers what these documents reveal about the men’s inner lives.

Michael Scott looks at how a time of crisis in the fourth century BC proved a dynamic moment of change for women in the Greek world.

Chris Corin exposes the huge apparatus created by Tsarist Russia to combat the threat of revolution.

Andrew Boxer traces the assimilation policies, indigenous rights, and the changing relationship between the US government and Native Americans.

The repatriation of British soldiers’ bodies from Afghanistan goes against a long tradition of burying the war dead in some foreign field and brings the conflict closer to home, writes Nick Hewitt. 

A contemporary account of life in Restoration London and Oxford by William Taswell, spanning the years 1660 until circa 1675. Includes personal obervations of the Plague and the Great Fire. Originally featured in the December 1977 issue of History Today.