Volume 65 Issue 11 November 2015

African-American suffragist Nannie Helen Burroughs, far left, at the Banner State Woman’s National Baptist Convention in 1915

Slavery, Women’s Suffrage and the American Civil War

As calls for women’s suffrage gained momentum following the Civil War, an uncomfortable racial faultline emerged dividing white suffragists from their African-American sisters.

Premiere of The Great Dictator

Chaplin's celebrated film first appeared on 15 October 1940.

The servant finds the dying Wether in a scene from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Jan Evert Grave, 1787. Rijksmuseum. Public Domain.

The Media’s First Moral Panic

Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was blamed for a spate of suicides during the ‘reading fever’ of the 1700s. It set a trend for manufactured outrage that is with us still.

Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie on horseback, by Walter Mittelholzer, c. February 1934. ETH Library Zurich. Public Domain.

In the Court of Haile Selassie

Three very different writers – Evelyn Waugh, Wilfred Thesiger, and Ryszard Kapuscinski – reported on the court of Haile Selassie during his reign, producing contrasting accounts of Ethiopia’s emperor.

Witches being burnt at the stake, from a German woodcut of 1555.

A Landmark Witch Trial

In 1615 Katharina, mother of the great scientist Johannes Kepler, was accused of witchcraft. Ulinka Rublack asks what her landmark trial tells us about early-modern attitudes towards science, nature and the family.

Flowers outside Kensington Palace for Princess Diana's Funeral. Photo by Maxwell Hamilton. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons

Is it British to Weep?

The reputation of Britons as a people who tightly control their emotions in the face of adversity is not necessarily a deserved one, argues Thomas Dixon.