The Smog of War: The Battle for Britain’s Clean Air
The wartime government’s programme of deliberate smoke production was an attempt to protect Britain from the Luftwaffe; for the National Smoke Abatement Society, the decision was a disaster.
The wartime government’s programme of deliberate smoke production was an attempt to protect Britain from the Luftwaffe; for the National Smoke Abatement Society, the decision was a disaster.
What makes a state? Is it its people, its borders, its government, or does it rest on recognition from international powers? Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the process by which states have been created and recognised has taken many forms.
For most of the late 16th and early 17th century, theatre companies touring England were welcomed in provincial towns. But as tastes changed, players found themselves take second billing to moral concerns.
The kings of medieval France were fascinated by the Mongols, who they saw as great empire builders. Eager to learn more, they amassed a huge archive of knowledge about them
Saint Augustine was educated for a Roman world, but it was his time in North Africa that shaped his identity, his faith, and Christianity itself.
Childbirth in the early modern period was a battleground between midwives and surgeons. The Chamberlen family of surgeons sought to reform the system with a revolutionary new tool: the forceps.
Chinese astronomers and the European Jesuits who worked alongside them found evidence of China’s antiquity in the heavens. Others were sceptical: how old was China really?
The slave trade was an international criminal enterprise. In 1811 an uprising on the slaving ship Amelia off the coast of West Africa revealed a complex network spanning four continents.
In the early 1900s the small but influential Zoroastrian community in India contemplated establishing a colony in Iran. Could the Parsis rely on British support?
Fearing the loss of regional identity, at the end of the 19th century, the French Basques invented a cultural tradition – but did that make them a threat to national unity?