USA

After the death of her husband in 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt left the White House and embarked upon a new career as ‘First Lady of the World’.

As America built a vision of its past Oliver Cromwell became both angel and demon.

Bayard Rustin, African American civil rights leader, was also a pacifist, a socialist and a gay rights activist.

Puerto Rico’s future might be statehood, independence or more of the status quo, but change is unlikely to be won through voting alone. 

What did British officers think of the American Civil War as it was happening?

The CIA has veered far from the purpose for which it was founded. Intended to gather and collate intelligence, it became instead a secretive organisation accountable to no one, which had disastrous consequences for Latin America. 

The first Native American troops to enlist for Federal service were fighting to return to their own lands.

The 19th-century craze for spiritualism ‘resurrected’ the dead through manipulated photography, a practice that boomed with the trauma caused by war – though it was not without its sceptics.

At its founding, Pennsylvania had one of the most tolerant criminal law systems in the world, but by the middle of the 18th century its capital Philadelphia was a ‘hell of the officials and preachers’.