Social

Women in India

A.A. Powell on a new exhibition and publication from the British Library.

Mell Feast to Michaelmas

Maggie Black continues her seasonal history of food and popular culture with a look at this period of autumnal celebration at Harvest End.

Spas: Pleasure or Penance?

Taking the waters became a Victorian passion and spa towns flourished. In this article the first prize winner in History Today's Essay Competition Pamela Steen, a student at the Open University, describes the pleasure and the pains of this fashion.

Gilbert & Sullivan and the Victorian Age

Ian Bradley shows that the characters and plots of Gilbert and Sullivan's operas reveal much that is of interest to the historian about certain individuals and institutions of the Victorian era.

Royal Favouritism in London Building

London must be transformed into a place 'safe from fire and beautiful and magnificent' decreed James I – and Patrick Youngblood finds it was only the wealthy who were to be entrusted with the privilege of building such a city.

The British Empire Exhibition of 1924

The Exhibition held in Wembley in 1924 was intended to herald a great Imperial revival - in fact, as Kenneth Walthew shows here, it was to prove an escapist delight from post-war gloom and retrenchment.

Psychohistory - An Australian Perspective

'Australia is a nation of immigrants' In the belief that manifestations of the unconscious can no longer be exempt from the attentions of the historian, John Rickard argues that psychohistory can illuminate this vital theme of Australian history.

Food as Dole

Maggie Black looks at the long tradition of giving food as alms.