CONTENTS Features

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

12 Aztecs in their own words J

BY CAMILLA TOWNSEND How historians are using pictorial sources and indigenous journals to revise European narratives of Aztec history 20 A time of change J

BY SUSAN MATTERN e evolution of our understanding of the menopause, and its in uence on women’s roles in societies around the world 28 The history of the nation state BY JERRY BROTTON e idea of national communities forged by geography and culture may seem selfevident. Yet nation states have a relatively short past – and may not have a long future

34 Ideas of nationhood J

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 J

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 J

BY DAVID EDMONDS How psychologists devised groundbreaking studies in attempts to understand the behaviours that enabled the Holocaust

J On the cover

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI

A L A M Y

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