APRIL 2023
In this issue…
You only have to browse the TV schedules or the shelves of your local book shop to appreciate our enormous fascination with crime. Whether in fact or fiction, we can’t stop devouring tales of lawbreakers and those who seek to bring them to justice. And this is no new phenomenon: criminal misdeeds have enthralled our ancestors for centuries – the more shocking, the better. In this month’s magazine we’re taking an in-depth look at the history of crime (and punishment), examining notorious debtors’ prisons, the stories of female killers, and the remarkable tale of a 19th-century outlaw. Also check out the visit to a historic jail in our regular Explore piece.
Meanwhile, April’s cover feature takes us back to the medieval era and the second largest empire in world history. The Mongols’ conquests were both astonishing and terrifying, but after the battles were over, what was it like to live under their rule? Nicholas Morton reveals how subject peoples sought to navigate the challenges of imperial domination.
Finally, this month we’re launching a new regular feature where a historian selects five sites that illuminate a city’s history. We begin this issue with Eleanor Janega on Prague, and if you’d like to discover more about the city – and the others in the series – then do check out our accompanying podcasts at historyextra.com/greatest-cities. I hope you enjoy these explorations, and do please write in to let us know what you think.
Rob Attar, Editor
Three things I’ve learned this month
1. How did frogs spawn?
In this month’s Q&A I was amazed to discover that an 18th-century scientist had dressed male frogs in trousers to determine how the amphibians reproduced.
2. Cashflow problems
Alexander Wakelam’s piece on debtors’ prisons is filled with fascinating revelations, including the (to me) surprising fact that most inmates in these jails were middle class, rather than the working poor.
3. First place for the second city
Before reading Richard Vinen’s article this issue, I’d not realised that, thanks to its local leadership, Birmingham was once described as “the best governed city in the world”.