The Friday Digest 03/07/15

This week's update features history, safe spaces and comfort zones, medieval graffiti and ten pairs of shoes that changed the world. 

* The release of archived criminal records which allows you to check for a 'black sheep' in your family tree. 

* Britain's seven most amazing ruins.

* Fifty human rights cases that transformed Britain. 

* Medieval graffiti: the lost voices of England’s churches in the Middle Ages.

* History, safe spaces and comfort zones ... 

* The exhibition which has captured fifty years of life in North East England.  

* Manchester's Whitworth has been named as Museum of the Year 2015 following a £15 million redevelopment that led to record visitor numbers to the art gallery. 

* The 'quiet revolution' of the home pregnancy test. 

* 'I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery.'

* Peter Jackson misses The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings so much that he's built Bilbo Baggins' home in his basement ... 

* A side of Abraham Lincoln you may not have seen before. 

* Shocking images of the Vietnam War. 

* Should we stop psychoanalysing Nixon? 

* The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project tracks the use of North American English. 

* Some hilarious style advice from the 1950s ... 

* Fashion victims: history’s most dangerous trends. 

* Ten pairs of shoes that changed the world.  

* 100 years of Maybelline ads show how little has changed in beauty ... 

* Five women cut from pop culture history for being too important. 

* The 1960s icons that could save music ... 

* Hokusai and the wave that swept the world. 

* Two self-portraits by Francis Bacon kept hidden in a private collection for many years sold for a combined £30 million at a sale at Sotheby's in London.

* The twenty-first century’s twelve greatest novels.  

* The crisis in non-fiction publishing. 

* Ten nouns that are always plural. 

* Detective duos in fiction.  

* Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller has won this year's Desmond Elliott Prize for first novels.