USA

St Patrick’s Day is a global celebration of Irish culture, but in the US its parades have always been political.

Eighty years ago the BBC tried to remedy postwar Anglo-American friction with Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America.

The testimonies of formerly enslaved people, collected in the 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project, provide a unique archive for historians.

1960s San Francisco is remembered as the capital of gay liberation, but it also saw the birth of conversion therapy.

The vast deserts of the American West posed logistical problems for the US Army. Camels offered a novel solution.

On 14 November 1848 the Fox sisters conjured up a movement when they made contact with the dead – or so they claimed.

The dismissal of a government scientist over the unproven battery additive AD-X2 galvanised the American scientific community in the 1950s.

The release of government documents related to the Kennedy assassination will keep scholars busy for years, but will we learn anything new?

‘What historical topic have I changed my mind on? That the Indian war then occurring to the north of Salem was crucial to the expansion and perpetuation of the witchcraft crisis.’

In The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole’s America: A Tale of Manhood, Sex, and Ambition in the Civil War Era, Michael deGruccio discovers a generation betrayed by the fight for freedom.