Feature

Often cast as subversive and seditious, despite the interventions of monarchs and governments the guilds of the Middle Ages have endured. 

The ‘emigration’ of thousands of poor London children in the 19th century was seen by its organisers as an act of Christian deliverance, but the experience of the young people sent to Canada tells a different story. 

When Roman forces burned the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, the Flavian dynasty thought it had defeated the Jewish god in the name of Jupiter. It was mistaken. 

For most Egyptians the country’s independence came with the revolution of July 1952, not with the end of the British protectorate in February 1922. Yet, as the experiences of three patriotic writers show, independence did not mean freedom.

In March 1722 rebellious Afghan forces laid siege to the Safavid capital. Was the great Iranian empire on the brink of collapse?

Europe’s Roma were the victims of Nazi genocide during the Second World War, but their persecution did not end in 1945. 

Flowers formed from pith paper captured the imagination of British society in the 19th century, sparking a search for the elusive ‘rice paper’ plant.

With the US riven by civil war, Napoleon III seized the opportunity to install an emperor in Mexico. The new regime soon fell apart in a catastrophic manner.

Official secrecy and institutional rivalry obscured the achievements of two crash programmes hastily launched to teach Japanese during the Second World War. 

The 19th-century craze for spiritualism ‘resurrected’ the dead through manipulated photography, a practice that boomed with the trauma caused by war – though it was not without its sceptics.