Manteo

In 1773, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a collection of poems. Jade Cuttle looks at the way her poems were described and asks what do we categorise as nature writing? Her essay considers the idea of "coining" and the work of a new generation of poet ...  Show more

What connects actors with baristas? In 1983, the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild published a book called The Managed Heart which studied the working world of airline stewards. Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal’s essay considers what it means when a waiter smiles as they serve ...  Show more

What was life really like in Tudor England? This was a society where monarchy was under strain, the church was in crisis and contending with war, rebellion, plague and poverty was a fact of daily life. Yet it was also an age rich in ideas and ideals, where women asserted their ...

The Goths were a Germanic tribe infamous for their brief sack of Rome in 410 AD but their cultural and political influence was felt throughout Europe for centuries. They re-shaped the Balkans, preserved the Roman way of life in Italy and presided over a cultural flourishing in Sp ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life of Pocahontas, the Native American woman who to English eyes became a symbol of the New World. During the colonisation of Virginia in the first years of the seventeenth century, Pocahontas famously saved the life of an English prisoner ...  Show more

Geoffrey Chaucer stands as a founding father of English literature, and ‘The Canterbury Tales’ is an enthralling account of his age, holding a mirror up to the traditional hierarchies of 14th century England. Chaucer’s own life was spent navigating the rapids of a particularly tu ...  Show more