20th Century

From Captain Cook to playboy Prince Bertie, Tessa Dunlop examines the appeal of the tattoo among high society.

Eva Anna Paula Braun was born in Munich on February 6th 1912.

The black activist Malcolm X was not a civil rights leader. Nor was he a victim of the mass media. He was its beneficiary, in life and death, argues Peter Ling.

Carl Peter Watts estimates the importance of the different reasons for British withdrawal.

The founder of Liberal Judaism in Britain, Claude Montefiore, died a 'disappointed and embittered' man. Dunia Garcia-Ontiveros explores his vast collection of pamphlets bequeathed to the London Library.

Concorde began regular test flights above Britain 40 years ago this month. Jad Adams looks back to a time when, wracked by industrial decline, a nation embraced the world’s first supersonic airliner.

Goa fell to Indian troops on December 19th 1961.

Todd Thompson describes how the relationship between a Christian missionary, nicknamed ‘Anderson of Arabia’, and a Muslim religious leader from the Italian-controlled region of Cyrenaica played a major role in the creation of modern Libya after 1945.

Gordon Marsden, a former editor of History Today, reflects on the advertisements that helped to fund the first 20 years of this magazine’s publication and explores the wider messages they reveal about sexism, empire and swinging Britain during the 1950s and 1960s.

At the Coronation Durbar of 1911 George V announced that the capital of British India was to be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. But the move to the new model city was a troubled one, as Rosie Llewellyn-Jones explains.

Alfred Nobel’s Peace Prize has become something other than its founder intended, claims Fredrik S. Heffermehl.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been a marked increase in accounts of the past made by those considered to have been on the ‘losing side’ of history. But, warns Jeremy Black, we should all be wary of the forces such histories can unleash.

Gated communities may be growing in number but they are nothing new, as Michael Nelson knows from personal experience.