Behind the Times

At the beginning of the 20th century Argentina was a major economic power. That all changed with the Great Depression.  

Those who control the media control the state. Lenin knew this, but by 1991 his Soviet successors had forgotten, to their ultimate cost.

The British government sought to hide the brutality of its conduct during the Kenya Emergency. Previously hidden files reveal an unpalatable truth.

For more than a century, what is now Yemen has seen waves of insurgency and conflict backed by competing foreign powers. 

Japan’s responsibility for ‘comfort women’ is avoided by the state and written out of national histories. Activists are working to make Japan confront its past.

Electric cars seem to offer a solution to the problem of the internal combustion engine. But technological advances have other consequences. 

Ethiopia’s current crisis is rooted in a long history of regional and ethnic defiance towards the political centre. 

Belarusian memory of the Second World War once helped legitimise the Lukashenka regime. Now it is undermining it. 

Historians and curators in heritage organisations, such as the National Trust, do not invent the past, they uncover it. 

Chinese history is dominated by a nationalist interpretation that owes much to British ideas of the 19th and early 20th centuries.