Cultural

Maggie Black on the history of bread and breadmaking.

Juliet Gardiner continues our Monument series, welcoming the opening of Linley Sambourne’s house in London as one of the few city house museums to show us the habitat of the urban dweller and to satisfy our curiosity about the surroundings of people’s lives in the past.

More witches were executed in the German-speaking territories than in any other part of Europe. Why was the German witch-hunt so assiduously and successfully prosecuted?

Mark Jones looks at the cultural power of messages on medals.

Japan had two great infatuations with the West: in the 1870s and during the American occupation of 1945-52. Forsaking traditional isolationism, Japan welcomed Western ideas and customs with open arms, and according to Jean-Pierre Lehmann, what resulted was not an ersatz Western culture but one that retained a distinct national identity

Graham Seal explores the life and legend of Ned Kelly.

Popular art in the form of cartoons, caricatures and simple engravings offered great potential for political propaganda as the revolutionary leaders discovered. 

The tango was to Argentina what jazz was to New Orleans. As Simon Collier explains, it swept the world in the pre-First World War era and Carlos Gardel was its star.

Lawrence A. Clayton on the Chinese labourers who came to work in Peru, often in appalling conditions.