Volume 38 Issue 3 March 1988

England's Ancien Regime

Was eighteenth-century England dynamic, entrepreneurial and secular, or hierarchic, conservative and confessional? Jeremy Black investigates recent 'revisionist' reassessments of the period.

The Foundling Hospital

Roy Porter describes an institution of the mid-18th century designed to care for abandoned infants.

Television's Luddites

Taylor Downing, producer of a dramatised documentary about the Luddite disturbances in Regency England, talks about the making of the current-affairs-style programme, and the 'then and now' parallels about resistance of skilled workers to the introduction of new technology.

Did the Portuguese Discover Australia?

Two hundred years before Captain Cook, Dieppe map makers placed the Portuguese flag on a large land-mass called Java-la-Grande approximately where Australia appears on today's atlas. Helen Wallis sifts through the cartographic evidence to examine the intriguing question.

Reassessing Peterloo

Peaceful protest or planned provocation? Philip Lawson re-examines 19th-century England's most famous law-and-order massacre with the aid of a key eyewitness account.