Issue 21

Articles from issue 21 of BBC World Histories

A 'teacher' in Milgram's study is instructed to administer an electric shock to a 'learner'.

Experiments in evil: the shocking efforts to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust

How has the way in which we understand the menopause evolved over time? (Illustration by Megan Reddi)

A time of change: a history of our understanding of the menopause

Kurdish fighters in north-west Iran, 1918

The history of the Kurds in Iraq: “the largest people never to have achieved statehood”

Fridtjof Nansen: Explorer, scientist, writer, humanitarian

The first great polar expedition: Fridtjof Nansen’s 1888 traverse of the Greenland Ice Sheet

A man digs a grave in Sarajevo for victims of the war in Bosnia, 1992

Yugoslavia: why shared Slavic identity couldn’t save an idealised nation from fracture and bloodshed

A page of the Codex Borbonicus, an Aztec folding book painted around the time of the Spanish invasion

What can the Aztecs tell us about themselves? The secrets of their ‘indigenous annals’

An account of the story of James Allen, whose sex at birth was revealed only by an autopsy conducted after their death

‘Female husbands’: the secret lives of 18th-century transgender pioneers