Society

A riveting collage portrays a century of Inuit history, and envisions a vibrant future

14 minutes

Chorus of testimony

Anne Frank’s diary is one of thousands of desperate, secret and vivid journals each bearing witness to the reality of war

Nina Siegal

Warfare as mercy and love

The daggers that knights carried to the crusades help us understand why they thought of holy war as an act of love

William Chester Jordan

One story, in a sea of millions, of swimming from China to freedom in Hong Kong

14 minutes

The life of Wanda Półtawska

Her closeness to Pope John Paul furnished him with anti-abortion ideals, fuelled by her survival of the Ravensbrück camp

Joy Neumeyer

Guide to a foreign past

The iconoclastic French historian Paul Veyne illuminated the past by showing how deeply alien it is to the present

Carlos Noreña

Lydia Maria Child, abolitionist

Taking up arms against slavery, the famous novelist foreshadowed the vexed role of the white woman activist today

Lydia Moland

Medieval babycare

From mansplaining about breastfeeding to debates on developmental toys, medieval parenting was full of familiar dilemmas

Katherine Harvey

What the tablets say

Some 3,700 years ago, an enslaved girl, a barber, and a king crossed paths in a city by the Euphrates. This is their story

Amanda H Podany

Women at the barricades

The transgressions of working-class women formed the revolutionary heart of the 1871 Paris Commune

Carolyn Eichner

The politics of pain

Medical science can only tell us so much. To understand pain, we need the cultural tools of history, philosophy and art

Rob Boddice

Geopolitics is for losers

The concept of geopolitics comes from German and Russian attempts to explain defeat and reverse loss of influence

Harold James

The doxxing of Rose Mainville

When a young street vendor found her name in a guidebook to the sex workers of Paris, she couldn’t live with the shame

Amanda E Herbert & David N Woodworth

From manners to mud – two women recall coming of age in Victorian London

10 minutes

Freedom from liquor

Ken Burns’s account of prohibition tells a popular story of booze in America. The historical record is far more sobering

Mark Lawrence Schrad

History by numbers

Is history a matter of individual agency and action, or of finding and quantifying underpinning structures and patterns?

Claire Lemercier & Claire Zalc

A peace activist’s harrowing account of nuclear war is a visceral case for disarmament

26 minutes

The discontent of Russia

Lenin envisioned Soviet unity. Stalin called Russia ‘first among equals’. Yet Russian nationalism never went away

Joy Neumeyer

The smile: a history

How our toothy modern smile was invented by a confluence of French dentistry and Parisian portrait-painting in the 1780s

Colin Jones

Cowboy progressives

You likely think of the American West as deeply conservative and rural. Yet history shows this politics is very new indeed

Daniel J Herman