1995

How did Hollywood screenwriter Frank Capra get involved in the sort of film projects that in his and other hands filled a generation of American servicemen with a...

Aidan Rankin examines the struggle of the Wichí Indians of North Argentina who fight back against discrimination in their daily lives.

A budding front-bench politician and his mistress ... not a tract for our times but an 1860s relationship recovered and reconstructed from love letters by the...

John Carr questions whether re-enacting classical theatre at historic sites is a good thing.

Johnathan Israel describes how the genius of the 17th-century Netherlands lay not just in painting but in a blazing a trail in civic pride and technological...

Maggie Black reviews three works on culinary history

Mitteleuropa at work

Two new books on medieval Mediterranean history

John McLeod presents a study from the last days of the Raj of an Indian ruler who defied the stereotype of princely extravagance and self-indulgence.

From Hitler's suicide to the Berlin blockade - Friedemann Bedurftig looks at the consequences of defeat, the process of denazification and reconstruction and the...

Grigori Chukhrai talks about the political pressures surrounding his award-winning Second World War film

Denise Silvester-Carr explores Eltham Palace and its connections with the Courtauld family.

Larry Gragg recounts the attempts of a younger son to shake off his reputation in 17th-century Barbados.

Christian Hesketh reviews works on the Napoleonic era and battles

Glen Jeansonne outlines how US involvement radically transformed American culture and society.

Exhibitions of African art and culture

Did America's far right plot against Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal - only to be foiled by a retired Marine Corps general? Clayton Cramer lifts the lid on an...

Monks and nuns living together: not a cause for scandal but, as Barbara Mitchell explains, an intriguing window onto the variety of monastic life - under the aegis...

When did England become England? Was Alfred really the great ruler of all the English - or was it just a question of clever Wessex PR? Patrick Wormald investigates...

Four new books on the US and the Cold War

Court culture

Christopher Chippindale reviews a work on art in antiquity

France's...

Christopher Innocent on ancient Australian burial sites.

Our round-up of the offerings from publishers this season, previewing interesting and intriguing history books for both the general reader and the specialist.

Re-opening of the National Museum.

A look into an ‘Army Museum’ in Brussels.

David Nash considers a cause celebre that tested tensions between pious tradition and a 'progressive' age.

Jeremy Black takes a cool look at three recent additions to the Access to History series

Jeremy Black weighs the pros and cons of narrative history.

Nick Henshall looks at a stimulating study guide to the British Empire.

Stephen Cross queries expert judgement on Fascist Europe

Nick Henshall praises the best Tudor textbook on the market.

Anthony Leahy reviews two books on Ancient Egypt.

Walter Makin gives two cheers for a sample of the popular Access to History series. 

Matthew Christmas praises the best history of warfare he has found.  

Graham Darby and Matthew Christmas look at two useful, but flawed, additions to the Lancaster Pamphlets series.  

The price of archaeology in Kent

Ann Hills on the campaign to save Lambley Railway Viaduct, South Tyne

Catherine Hills stalks these Roman ruins in Norfolk

Mack Holt argues that the early-modern obsession with tradition was sometimes a deliberate smokescreen for innovation.

Archaeological wonders in the Mediterranean

Penny Johnston on a campaign to rebuild a historic Canadian church

Penelope Johnston discovers four Martello Towers in the Great Lakes, Canada.

Tim Thornton explains how a complex legal case casts light on centralised royal power in Tudor England and its limitations.

Graham Darby looks at why things happen, and argues that short-term causes are paramount.  

Frank McDonough reviews the debate over Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy

Using evidence from contemporary culture, Richard Cust reassesses the Stuart monarch's political style.

Before 1850 many US citizens did not dream of Christmas at all. Penne Restad tells how and why this changed – and played its role in uniting the States in social...

Anne Murphy reviews three new books on the Church

The way in which the church commemoration of King Charles I's 1649 execution became a...

Bernard Porter looks at the Victorian capitalist who made his fortune from dealing in weapons of war and constructed a Northumberland haven with the proceeds....

Annette Bingham rediscovers Roman Crete

Seel reassesses the career of Oliver Cromwell'...

Painting, sculpture, photography, poster art, architecture, pageant - all were used by the totalitarian regimes in the 1930s. We review a selection of the images...

Four new book son British political history from the 19th century

Eberhard Jackel draws on Nazi security reports to chart the change in German public opinion in the last year of the war and discusses the shifts in psychology that...

Previously unpublished account of a British veteran, caught up as a POW in the Allied bombing of Dresden. Dick Sheehy recounts his experiences in and around the...

Laurie Johnston explores the significance of public education in Cuba's efforts to forge a national identity in a period of US intervention.

Denis Macshane reviews two new books on post-war British politics

Jeffrey Green describes the impact of a troupe of six 'dwarf savages' and what it reveals about social and racial attitudes of the time.

Kevin Sharpe reviews two new books

Two works on politicians of the 20th century

Two new books on the British Communist Party

Philip Mansel explores two new books examining Britain and Europe

Peter Mandler assesses new books on landownership

Stephen Rigby reviews three works on Medieval England and its capital

David Abulafia reassesses the life and motives of a notorious ruler and the complex web of Renaissance diplomacy involving him which led up to the Italian wars.

Ann Hills introduces the Popular Flying Association - builders of prototypes and historical reenactments.

Pauline Stafford reviews

Medieval Europe

Robert Stradling uncovers the tale of the Irishmen who went off to fight for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and the reaction they provoked, then and now....

New works on the Weimar Republic

Monarchs could do anything – or could they? Steven Ellis examines what happened when commands from the centre had to he executed in practice in the remoter parts of...

Italy's Futurists - led by Filippo Marinetti - exploded onto the European cultural scene during and after the Great War with all the garishness and fizz of some of...

Richard Cavendish breathes 18th-century elegance into the Thomas Gainsborough Musuem

Penelope Corfield looks at the controversy about religion and ancien régime in the Georgian state and comes to a pluralist conclusion.

The German historian and Damals contributor Reimer Hansen chronicles the last days of the Nazi regime and shows how the detailed response to the Allied demands had a...

Graham Norton looks at dilapidated forts and castles in West Africa

Margaret Walsh reviews three new books on American society

We eavesdrop on Ian Dawson as he interrogates the sources and wonders whether the first Tudor was really so mysterious.

John Guy doubts whether policy was ever imposed on the most wilful of kings.

Tower Museum, Londonderry

David Welch attributes the Nazi leader's electoral success to much more than slick propaganda.

Alan Steinweis considers how a Victorian historian's hero-worship became entangled with the propaganda visions of the Nazis a century later.

Tony Aldous takes a look at the establishment of county teams, set up for the preservation of historical buildings around the country.

Peter Stead looks at how a film that had British audiences chuckling, had a tarter subtext on social and class divisions at the end of the 1950s

Peter Heehs looks at the Indian army who threw in their lot against the Raj and with the Japanese in the Second World War.

Two new works on British politics

Isabel de Madariaga discusses three books on 18th-century Europe

Austin Mitchell takes a trip down memory lane with veteran MPs of the 1945 General Election.

Piling a clutch of French masterpieces into the back of his car, a young British Government official secured the paintings for himself-and a treasure-trove of others...

Nicholas Soteri reflects on the early religious controversies of Eastern Europe, focusing in particular on an often overlooked kingdom, the Khazar..

Four new histories focussing on the Labour Party during and after the Second World War.

Iain Fenlon explores how Catholic Europe's great 16th-century sea victory over the Turk was celebrated and propagandised.

Louise Stevenson argues that girls growing up in mid-19th-century America were far more intellectually forceful and streetwise than often given credit for.

Theo Barker reviews.

Liz Sagues looks at how the Museum of London are revamping their current exhibitions.

Peter Mellini looks at this new study of the Blitz period.

T.C.W. Blanning argues that royalty in France undermined itself through mismanagement, despotism and sleaze

Russia oldest love letter was discovered, in 1995, among medieval rubbish heaps excavated in Novgorod.

Sue Harper reveals how a swashbuckling tale of gypsy romance opens an unexpected window on 1940s women in Britain.

Charles C. Noel illustrates how the remodelling of the Spanish capital reflected the new philosophical and cultural concerns of her rulers in the 'Age of Reason'....

Two new books on modern Britain and rights and security

Chris O’ Donnell’s codpiece in ‘Batman Forever’ echoes men’s historical urge to reveal their assets – Lois Banner looks at coded messages of gender, sexuality and...

Two books on the city of Manchester and its history

Geoffrey Scammell reviews two new books on exploration and discovery

Religion and 19th-century Germany

John Childs looks at histories of European figures

Two new books explore the city in history

Edward Corp revalues the contribution, as emigre statesman and trend-setting art-collector, of one of the leading Jacobites at Saint-Germain.

Commerce in the 16th and 17th centuries

Three new works on the Americas

The Madness of King George

Geoffrey Best reviews three new books on the Napoleonic era and European warfare

Brian Neve discusses what the film that made Marlon Brando a fifties icon has to tell us about American society and politics in the McCarthy era.

Peter Riddick looks at the way oral history can add another perspective to our understanding of situations and events.

Four new books on Nazism and the Second World War in Europe

Richard Rathbone explains how a meeting in Manchester 50 years ago helped lay the vision for Pan-Africanism

He marketed himself as a man of principle - a public image of which David Eastwood exposes the inaccuracy.

F.Bremer and E.Rydell examine the tricks used by preachers in 17th-century England and America to hold their audiences.

Victor Kiernan reviews a series of essays for E.P. Thompson

Four new books on the ancient world.

Theo Barker reviews two books on British industry.

Gerard de Groot argues that exploitation of silent majority fears about 60s student protest is the key to understanding Ronald Reagan's rise to prominence in...

Walter Schwarz reviews works on British religious history

Antony Taylor finds the roots of Australian republicanism stretching back into the 19th century

Richard Wilkinson wonders why historians have accepted the Cardinal's extravagant assessment of himself.

Brian Allen looks at how contemporary military and political aspirations and events inspired – or failed to inspire the artists of mid-Georgian Britain.

A round-up of the latest history titles marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe.

Lesley Hall looks at sexuality as a recent recruit to historical studies – and at more than a century of argument and evasion

Nigel Saul reviews this new book on the 13th-century statesman and soldier

Luke Syson examines how artifice, art and political calculation combined to produce medal...

Martin McCauley argues that our obsession with Stalin as a mass murderer evades the real question – how did his system work?

In the first of our contributions from the Russian magazine Rodina, Sergei Kudryashov charts the twists and turns of the Soviet leader's tricksy diplomacy with his...

Lisa Jardine speaks at the Longman/ History Today awards on Erasmus.

The story of an almost unknown war and its international repercussions on the eve of Pearl Harbor.

David Birmingham looks at how the invented traditions of 19th-century Swiss history cemented a sense of national identity.

Nick Tiratsoo reviews two books on America's European role during the Second World War era.

Brian Dooley reviews two new works on America and race.

Three new books on the Roman Empire

Two books exploring Australia throughout both World Wars

Henry Chadwick reviews this new collection

A new study of the continent

David Elliott looks at how Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler used culture to their own ends and how the ramifications of this has continued to the present.

Richard Cavendish explores the Bell Foundry Museum.

Two new books explore the life and reign of the Tudor queen

Richard Cavendish examines the history of the British Golf Museum.

Desmond Gregory reviews Anthony McFarlane's study of British colonization.

Esmond Wright reviews four volumes on American foreign relations.

Three new studies of the Reformation period

Richard Cavendish goes behind bars at the Beaumaris Gaol and Courthouse, Anglesey

Two books covering periods of English religious history

Catherine King reviews two new books on art

Study from the Iron Age to the Industrial era

Studies on French history

Andrew Roberts reviews

Abigail Beach looks at constructing communities in the first half of the century

Chivalry in the Middle Ages

Martin Daunton argues that Labour's commitment to public ownership owed little to socialism and more to circumstances at the end of the First World War.

Penelope Corfield delights in the traditions and splendours of the Apothecaries Hall in the capital.

M.R.D. Foot reviews a new work on the Second World War field marshal

Richard Vinen reveiws the early career of the former French President.

Three new books on society and class from the 18th century

Cathy Mercer reconstructs a wonder of the ancient world

Alison Peden looks at what the Middle Ages speculated on and thought was theologically correct about the edges of the medieval world.

Omer Bartov asks how the armies of lords and kings became the forces of peoples and nations.

Michael Sturma identifies the portrayal of South pacific women.

Andrew Boyd offers a bicentennial analysis of a key element in the culture of Protestant Ulster.

Russian and Cold War history books

Explorations of national identities

Greg Walker reviews four new books on Reformation era English society.

Andrew Martindale explains why Renaissance Sienese doctored the history of a 12th-century papacy when decorating their new city hall.

Lawrence Freedman reviews two new works on the post-war balance of global power

Three new history books on Revolutionary France.

Penry Williams discusses books on the Elizabethan era and threat from Spain

British imperialism and colonialism

Graham Seel uncovers their pivotal and sometimes underhand role in the struggle between king and parliament.

Reviews of books covering Athens and the ancient world

Richard Cavendish reflects on the growth of the Clark's shoe industry.

William Makin investigates an evil organisation, accomplice of a bigoted, racist and corrupt monarchy.

Philip Longworth looks at a religious adventurer who ended up reviled as a double agent in 17th-century Europe.

New book looking at North American Industry through archaeology

Social transformation in rural Scotland.

New innovations in radiology have sparked public criticism as to its safety and cost-...

Richard Cavendish trawls through the exhibits to examine the legacy of the city's whaling and fishing industry.

President Harry Truman's WWI experiences are considered, and the...

Penny Young on Turkey's equivalent to Hadrian's Wall

Nigel Pearce marks the completion of a TV series spanning world history.

Historians of the world unite at conference

Ann Hills assesses how the African country is protecting its past

Climate, disease and the relationship between them fascinated 18th-century observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Ronald Rees explores the debate and its...

Fit for a Queen: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight

Michael Biddiss looks at how the victorious Allies dealt with the unprecedented prosecution of genocide and mass atrocities by the Nazi leadership and how fair the...

Gennady Bordyugov discusses how the Great Patriotic War transformed the Soviet state's response to nationalism and what ordinary Russians expected and hoped for...

Jane Lewis assess the arguments surrounding the British welfare state.

Centenary celebrations of the building of Westminster Cathedral

Counter-history - Dmitry Oleinikov and Sergei Kudryashov offer a fascinating speculation on what might have happened for the future of the world if Operation...

The triumph of good guys over bad is still the popular picture of British history, invented by Whig historians in the nineteenth century. Liberty defeated tyranny...

Pauline Croft on why court history is relevant to the 1990s.

Michael Paris looks at pioneering 1920s film about war in the air over the Western Front, the passions it aroused and the genre it created.

Madelon Powers explains how bold women carved out their own space in the saloons of America.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto argues for a new world history for the Millennium