Adam Mestyan

Urbanisation might be the most profound change to human society in a century, more telling than colour, class or continent

Michael Goebel

Imperial Chinese conscription shows how ordinary people exercise influential political skills, even in a repressive state

Michael Szonyi

The British, Irish and Lebanese have all claimed descent from the ancient Phoenicians. But ancient Phoenicia never existed

Josephine Quinn

İrvin Cemil Schick

Men from the Shetland Islands worked the whaling expeditions to the Antarctic. Until the whales were gone

Lyndsie Bourgon

Daegan Miller

Heidi Matthews

An 18th-century creole slaveholder invented the idea of ‘racial prejudice’ to defend diversity among a slaveowning elite

Blake Smith

Edward Kolla

Eighteenth-century Indian arms were as sophisticated as European. Then came the British Empire to drive industry backwards

Priya Satia

John Rapley

Medieval people knew that love and pain and dread and desire made the experience of education possible, and could also sow ruin

Irina Dumitrescu

Miles Macallister

Medieval people feared death by celibacy as much as venereal disease, and practiced complex sexual health regimens

Katherine Harvey

Omnia El Shakry

Vickie B Sullivan

Nuclear deterrence continues to dominate international relations. Yet there is no proof it ever worked, nor that it ever will

David P Barash

David Bentley Hart

Western liberalism is not the apex and terminus of human history, and it ought not to serve as the measure of Islam

Zaheer Kazmi

Henry Theophilus Finck sought to transform the modern United States, by appealing to Americans' tastebuds

Nadia Berenstein

Bruce Robbins

During the Cold War, US propagandists worked to provide a counterweight to Communist media, but truth eluded them all

Melissa Feinberg

At their best, daredevils rival philosophers and mystics in their exploration of human mortality and spirit

Lary Wallace