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Social history

April 2026

  • Women working in a Magdalene Laundry, holding fabric in industrial setting, circa 1940s.

    Book of the day
    The Fallen by Louise Brangan review – an enraging account of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries

  • A street scene from Donnybrook Road, Dublin, 1926.

    ‘Such a mix of people’: Ireland of 1926 was not monocultural, release of census shows

March 2026

  • American Gothic, Washington DC, 1942 … widowed mother Ellla Watson.

    ‘The camera is my weapon of choice’: Gordon Parks’ era-defining shots of segregation – and those who defied it

  • Lyn Smith

    Other lives
    Lyn Smith obituary

February 2026

  • Photograph: Getty/Guardian Design

    The Audio Long Read
    From the archive: ‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today – podcast

    This week, from 2022: Idealising the past is nothing new, but there is something peculiarly revealing about the way a certain generation of Facebook users look back fondly on tougher times

    By Dan Hancox. Read by Dermot Daly
    Podcast38:33

January 2026

  • A crowd of people outside St Paul's Cathedral, London, celebrating New Year's Eve, 1 January 1924.

    From the Guardian archive
    New Year 1926: boisterous welcome in Manchester’s Albert Square

    1 January 1926: Mud churned almost to a froth by dancing, promenading and staggering feet

December 2025

  • John Lucas

    Other lives
    John Lucas obituary

  • ‘It became a huge global thing’ … a scene from the 1983 film.

    ‘It’s been called the greatest hip-hop film ever’: how we made cult graffiti classic Wild Style

November 2025

  • Margaret Atwood photographed at Victoria College, Toronto University.

    ‘If I was American, I’d be worried about my country’: Margaret Atwood answers questions from Ai Weiwei, Rebecca Solnit and more

    Democracy, birds and hangover cures – famous fans put their questions to the visionary author
  • Ian Marchant wearing a turquoise jumper and an unbuttoned brown coat, standing next to a body of water surrounded by trees

    Ian Marchant obituary

    Writer, performer and broadcaster with a talent for being interested in everything and a particular fascination with British counterculture

    • Bila Burba review – how recreating brutal battles helps pass history down the generations

    • Elspeth King obituary

    • Other lives
      Gren Gaskell obituary

October 2025

  • Robert Wilkinson

    Other lives
    Robert Wilkinson obituary

    Other lives: Local authority community worker who became a freelance expert in recording oral history
  • Peter Ford.

    Other lives
    Peter Ford obituary

    Other lives: Author and editor who co-wrote a biography of Joseph Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’

    • Donegal to Dakar: the Irish play about British rule hitting home in post-colonial Senegal

    • Is this painting who we now are? The identity grapplings of mystic artist Ben Edge

    • Gillian Tindall obituary

August 2025

  • Woodcraft Folk in Stanmore, Middlesex, in May 1947.

    A century on, the Woodcraft Folk are still thriving and treasured

  • ‘It feels like the past and the present are somehow taking place at the same time’ … from the series Lunch Poems by Leah Frances.

    My best shot
    A super-friendly 1950s-style diner, empty because of Covid: Leah Frances’s best photograph

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