How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. I n March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of ...

I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I n the 30 ...

Italy’s entry into the Great War in 1915 prompted 300,000 men to return to their homeland to join the fight. Were they ...

How did Western Europe learn of the fall of Constantinople, the loss of Negroponte, and the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto? In the ...

It is night in a small room behind a post office in late 18th-century Paris. Six clerks work by candlelight, each moving with practised speed, first pressing letter seals into small balls of ...

Greg Grandin has dedicated his career to the study of how United States imperialism shaped Latin America and how its Latin American empire shaped the United States. America, América may be his most ...

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels finds that the son of God is more than the sum of his parts. In the New Testament, Jesus is a charismatic miracle healer. He ...

The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term were nothing if not controversial. This was especially the case in the United States’ northern neighbour where his talk of Canada becoming the ‘51st ...

The institution of marriage sits at the intersection of the personal and political like no other. No relationship is more intimate; none is as prone to the trappings of fantasy. Few institutions have ...

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of the controversial satirist and philosopher. Imagine a beehive. The ...