Feature

Robert Ritter, head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police, conducting an interview with a Romani woman, 1936.

The Roma Holocaust

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

Ducks and Flowering Water Plants by a Pond, pith paper painting by Sunqua, c.1820.

In Pursuit of Pith

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

The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, by Édouard Manet, 1868.

The Death of an Emperor

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.

The ‘Course Boys’ outside Ivyholme at Dulwich College. Sandy Wilson is fourth from left in the front row; Peter Parker is sixth from left.

Learning Japanese

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

Fake Views

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.

Saving Face

The Renaissance face provided clues about the wealth and health of its owner. Those who had been disfigured were often mistreated, but to alter one’s appearance carried a stigma of its own.

Philadelphia waterfront, 18th-century coloured engraving.

Crime in the City of Brotherly Love

At its founding, Pennsylvania had one of the most tolerant criminal law systems in the world, but by the middle of the 18th century its capital Philadelphia was a ‘hell of the officials and preachers’.