For many of us who grew up in the 20th century, our first encounters with the past will have been through the movies and TV shows that filled our screens. And one brief period has a genre all of its own: the Western. But away from the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ of legend, the real story of the Wild West is the story of the birth of the most powerful nation on Earth. And what a tale it is, every bit as dramatic, jaw-dropping and harrowing as Hollywood would have us believe. We go west from page 26.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the world was a very different place, as our revealing photographs from Victorian London show (p64. And sticking with Britain’s background, there are few more defining moments in the history of these islands than the Battle of Flodden (p70, when the Scottish King James IV became the last British monarch to be killed in battle.