BBC World Histories Magazine - 03.2020

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CONTENTS Features

✪ On the

cover

COVER ILLUSTRATION

BY DAVIDE BONAZZI

Sea ice in a fjord in

Greenland. In this

issue’s Footsteps

feature on page

90, we follow the

journey of Norwegian

explorer Fridtjof

Nansen, who crossed

the island’s vast

ice sheet in the late

19th century

34

Ideas of nationhood ✪

BY ANGEL SMITH, JOHN CONNELLY,

JOHAN FRANZÉN & DAVID REYNOLDS

What happens when regions want to break

away from larger states? Experts review

independence movements in Scotland,

Catalonia, Iraqi Kurdistan and Yugoslavia

48

Transgender history ✪

BY JEN MANION

Meet the ‘female husbands’ – individuals

assigned as female at birth but living as men

• who challenged societal views of sex,
  relationships, law and work in past centuries

64

Experiments in evil ✪

BY DAVID EDMONDS

How psychologists devised groundbreaking

studies in attempts to understand the

behaviours that enabled the Holocaust

12

Aztecs in their own words ✪

BY CAMILLA TOWNSEND

How historians are using pictorial sources

and indigenous journals to revise European

narratives of Aztec history

20

A time of change ✪

BY SUSAN MATTERN

The evolution of our understanding of the

menopause, and its influence on women’s

roles in societies around the world

28

The history of the nation state

BY JERRY BROTTON

The idea of national communities forged

by geography and culture may seem self-

evident. Yet nation states have a relatively

short past – and may not have a long future