Social

A lively study of a potentially dispiriting subject.

For the past 600 years the island of Java has been the scene for the encounter of the two major cultural and religious traditions of the world.

In 1926 the mining dispute led to the General Strike. Chris Wrigley writes how the memory of the hardship of those months has left a permanent legacy of bitterness in industrial relations in the coal industry.

David Low, the cartoonist, met Horatio Blimp, a retired Colonel, in a Turkish bath near Charing Cross in the early 1930s. Many agree with C.S. Lewis that Colonel Blimp was 'the most characteristic expression of the English temper in the period between the two wars.'

edited by Paul Slack

The activities and success of the Resistance movement in France from 1940-1944 is examined by Roderick Kedward.

'Compare the wealth and refinement of cities such as Mexico... in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the austere simplicity, verging on poverty, of... Philadelphia, a misleading splendour; what was dawn for the United States was twilight for Latin America...' Octavio Paz

Gertrude Himmelfarb considers why and when poverty ceased to be a ‘natural’ condition and become a ‘social’ problem in the Early Industrial Age.

Julia Phillips charts the history of women in British society.

Throughout Europe, the end of the First World War brought in its wake disillusion, civil unrest and even revolution. As Daniel Francis explains here, it was the same story in Canada in 1919.