Volume 62 Issue 2 February 2012

As the debate rages about how history should be taught in state schools David Cannadine discusses his recent research project.

Hugh Purcell tells how Kitty Bowler, a young American, captured the heart of Tom Wintringham, the 'English Captain' at Jarama.

Britain’s recent disputes with the European Union are part of a long historical narrative, argues James Ellison – but it is not the whole story.

Keith Lowe on the dilemmas faced by a victorious but financially ruined Britain in its dealings with postwar Germany.

The British Battalion of the International Brigades, formed to defend the Spanish Republic against the forces of General Franco, first went into battle at Jarama in February 1937. It was the beginning of a bruising, often dispiriting campaign.

Christopher Allmand examines Alain Chartier’s Le Livre des Quatre Dames, a poem written in response to the English victory at Agincourt, and asks what it can tell us about the lives of women during this chapter in the Hundred Years War.

The year 1812 was a turning point in the career of the industrialist Robert Owen. Ian Donnachie examines his Essays on a New View of Society, in which Owen first aired the ideas about popular education and workers’ welfare that would make him famous as a reformer.

Contemporary culture places a high premium on novelty. Armand D’Angour argues that we should consider the more balanced views about old and new found in classical Greece.

When the world’s population reached seven billion it prompted a great deal of nonsense to be written about Thomas Malthus. Robert J. Mayhew sets the record straight.

Richard Almond has trawled medieval and Renaissance sources for insights about ladies’ riding habits in the Middle Ages and what they reveal about a woman’s place in that society.