Voting Before the Secret Ballot
Before the secret ballot, voting in Britain was a theatrical, violent and public affair. The Act that made democracy private turned 150 this year.
Social
Charity Begins at Home
The ‘emigration’ of thousands of poor London children in the 19th century was seen by its organisers as an act of Christian deliverance, but the experience of the young people sent to Canada tells a different story.
In the Shadow of the Poor Law
Britain has been a high inequality, high poverty nation for most of the last 200 years.
Take me to the Church
The medieval parish church was the meeting point of many different things, both sacred and secular.
Baby Boom or Bust?
The Covid pandemic seems to have caused a birth dearth. Historically, how have countries responded to falling birthrates?
Meeting an Urgent Need
The First World War threw widows and their brothers-in-law together, but their marriages were considered incestuous.
Pigeon Racing: A Miner’s World?
Men who spent their working lives underground found a new world of freedom in racing birds.
All By Myself
Solitude was treated with suspicion in the Middle Ages. For most people it has only been a possibility in recent times.
Abbots Ascendant
William Chester Jordan’s study of one of medieval Europe’s great monastic rivalries suggests that social mobility may have been more common in the Middle Ages than historians previously thought.
Hard Work
The British government’s universal credit scheme seeks solutions to problems that have frustrated politicians for centuries.