Social

Peter Donaldson examines how the British people reacted to the various stages of the South African war of 1899-1902.

Court fashion, a love of birdsong and the pressures of being a king are some of the subjects discussed in letters between Philip II of Spain and his teenage daughters. Janet Ravenscroft explores the human side of one of Europe’s most powerful Renaissance monarchs.

America has struggled to reform public healthcare for over 100 years and now has a byzantine, costly system controlled by powerful, money-hungry interest groups. Can President Obama deliver reform?

The 2009 Nobel Prize winner for literature is well placed to describe the trials of Eastern European minorities through the maelstrom of the 20th century, writes Markus Bauer.

The American soldiers who fought their way through the islands of the Pacific during the Second World War encountered fierce Japanese resistance but few local people. That all changed with the invasion of the Mariana Islands, says Matthew Hughes.

R.C. Richardson describes the fortunes of young women driven by poverty into domestic service in early modern England. A number fell victim to predatory masters and ended up with illegitimate children, only to be ejected form households into penury or, worse, executed for infanticide.

Sexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains. 

Richard Overy looks behind the myth of a vulnerable island defended by a small band of fighter pilots to give due credit to the courage of the redoubtable civilian population.

Kathryn Hadley joins a group of schoolteachers and police officers in an innovative project that seeks ways to better understand the Holocaust.

At a time of widespread concern about the patriotism of 'economic migrants' and political refugees, Peter Barber tells the story of one 19th-century immigrant whose affection for Britain grew as political crisis severed his attachment to home.