BBC History UK - June 2023

Should historians interpret the past through the prism of the present?

A recent debate about whether the study of history should address contemporary concerns exposed faultlines in academic approaches

\"History - like any person's story - is messy. It doesn't fit into neat boxes\"

EIGHTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD JAMES MEREDITH walks into Bully’s Soul Food Restaurant, a traditional eaterie in Jackson, Mississippi

A European success story

PETER ANDERSON is impressed by a sweeping history of modern Spain, covering a century in which the country experienced both wartime tragedy and economic triumph

Hitler's forgotten victims

CHRISTINE SCHMIDT welcomes an important new book detailing the fraught search for justice by the Roma in the aftermath of their genocidal persecution by the Nazis

Visions of England

MICHAEL WOOD enjoys a thought-provoking exploration of English identity from the postwar period to the present day and the myths that have been told about England

\"Henry was not a great king but he was respected as a most Christian one\"

DAVID CARPENTER talks to David Musgrove about the second part of his biography of King Henry II, and the extraordinary revolution that removed him from power in 1258

The queen who wouldn't go quietly

Margaret of Anjou was a foreigner and a woman. Those facts alone should have sunk her bid to regain the English throne for her husband, Henry VI. Yet, writes Joanna Arman, when it came to fighting her family’s corner, Margaret simply didn’t know when she was beaten

How Britain stirred the cauldron of conflict in Palestine

Having ousted the Ottomans from Palestine in 1917, Britain administered a territory that was already a tinderbox of tensions between Arabs and Jews. Matthew Hughes explores the bloody end of the Palestine Mandate and the emergence of the State of Israel

WHEN GERMS MADE HISTORY

Infectious diseases don't just make individuals sick - they can cause seismic shifts in societies. Jonathan Kennedy charts six moments when pathogens such as plague, smallpox and malaria played key roles in major cultural, political and economic transformations

Black masses, lethal potions and the plot to kill a king

In the 1670s, Louis XIV of France was the target of a series of assassination attempts involving poisons and necromancy. But who was the perpetrator? Josephine Wilkinson untangles a conspiracy that scandalised a nation