Issue 21 of BBC World Histories is out now

BBC World Histories, a title from the makers of BBC History Magazine, brings you a fresh take on our global past – and how it shapes our lives today.

In our March/April 2020 issue, now on sale:

Aztecs in their own words

How historians are using pictorial sources and indigenous journals to revise European narratives of Aztec history | By Camilla Townsend

Menopause: A time of change

Susan Mattern considers the evolution of our understanding of the menopause, and its influence on women’s roles in societies around the world

The history of the nation state

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, writes Jerry Brotton

Ideas of nationhood

What happens when regions want to break away from larger states? Experts review independence movements in Scotland, Catalonia, Iraqi Kurdistan and Yugoslavia

Transgender history

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

Experiments in evil

David Edmonds explores how psychologists developed groundbreaking studies in attempts to understand the behaviours that enabled the Holocaust

Plus: Michael Booth explores the long roots of tensions in east Asia. Elsewhere, Mary Beard discusses the role of the nude in western art with Matt Elton and Janina Ramirez

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Coming up in issue 22 (on sale from 23 April 2020)

The Californian century

How the US state led decades of cultural and technological progress

Sardinian nationalism

What the Mediterranean island’s political history reveals about 21st-century isolationism

British nuclear testing

The harrowing stories of servicemen who witnessed atomic experiments in the 1950s