North America

Documentary film-maker Martin Smith calls for makers of history programmes for television to reassess their standards.

Mark Weisenmiller shows how the fate of Al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners in Cuba is linked to a US Supreme Court decision of sixty years ago.

Thomas S. Garlinghouse discusses the slow acceptance of archaeological evidence for sophisticated civilisation in pre-Columbian North America

President William McKinley was shot at a public reception during the Pan-American Exposition in the city of Buffalo on September 6th, 1901.

Robert Poole contributes to our occasional Film in Context series, with a look at the way in which Stanley Kubrick redefined our views not only of the future, but of space itself.

Newfoundland celebrates fifty years as Canada's tenth province and remembers the Vikings arriving a thousand years earlier.

When in 1681 pirate Bartholomew Sharpe captured a Spanish ship and with it a detailed description of the west coast of the Americas, he gave English cartographers a field day and won himself an unexpected acquittal. James Kelly explains.

Simon Smith questions our image of buccaneers as bloodthirsty opportunists claiming they were often highly organised and efficient businessmen in the waters of the Caribbean.

Barbara Schreier offers a fascinating insight into how the dress, customs and attitudes of Jewish women escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe altered as part of their assimilation as Americans.