2005

Lucy Worsley reviews a book by James Shapiro.

Gregor Benton commends a new title which explores the importance of the May Fourth Movement in shaping modern Chinese society and politics.

Historian June Purvis gives her very personal reflections on attending the ceremonies on HMS Victory on Trafalgar Day 2005.

Confusion between English and British history goes back a long way, as Alan MacColl reveals.

Peter Furtado reveals the British Academy Prizewinners of 2004.

A Tudor portrait in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, once believed to be Mary I when princess, has recently been relabelled ‘Possibly Lady Jane Grey’ as the...

Peter Furtado visits the new National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, the museum of Welsh industrial and maritime heritage.

Paul Dukes on a pair of titles examining the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War.

The Roman emperor abdicated on May 1st, 305.

Jonathan Hughes discovers the humanity of Thomas Charnock, a forgotten Elizabethan alchemist in search of the philosopher’s stone.

Russell Chamberlin describes the revelations of a recent conference on the archaeology of Cleopatra’s Alexandria.

Gavin Schaffer argues that the British have always been ambivalent in their attitude towards refugees, especially at times of war.

David Feldman reviews a timely publication which traces the history of the debate on world poverty and globalisation and its relation to current thinking and...

Stephen Cooper describes how John Hawkwood, a tanner’s son from Essex, became a mercenary in late fourteenth-century Italy, and after his death acquired a reputation...

Judy Greenway recalls a colourful trial involving an Italian anarchist and a policeman in the year of the Aliens Act. Illustrations from The Daily Graphic, October...

Robert Pearce argues that we should get better acquainted with the 'unknown prime minister'.

Robert Pearce gives a historian’s-eye view of George Orwell’s classic novel.

Retha Warnicke uncovers the real reason for Henry VIII's divorce from his fourth wife.

John MacKenzie suggests that imperial rule and the possession of empire were an essential component of British identity, life and culture for over 200 years from...

Richard Cavendish explains how Archbishop Scrope and Thomas Mowbray were executed on June 8th, 1405.

Two hundred years after William Pitt took on Napoleon, Europe is in crisis again. Keith Robbins warns Tony Blair that there are no easy fixes to the issues of...

Sixty years ago, on January 27th, 1945, the Red Army liberated what was left of the Auschwitz extermination camp. Taylor Downing reveals extraordinary aerial...

The greatest battle of Napoleon’s career took place two hundred years ago, on December 2nd, 1805. Although it is often called the Battle of the Three Emperors,...

The famous French author Alexandre Dumas never let fact get in the way of a good story: his ability to spin a yarn made his books instant bestsellers. But in...

Jonathan North introduces the story of the warm reception Bonaparte received from one St Helena resident, a story that will soon be the subject of a feature film...

Stewart Lone looks beyond the idea of the impassive, self-sacrificing citizen to discover how ordinary Japanese people really reacted to the war with Russia, 1904-05...

Was Alexander Hamilton born in 1755 or 1757? He himself was confused about the year of his birth, but January 11th 1755 is currently considered the most likely...

Richard Cavendish charts the life of the Italian nationalist Guiseppe Mazzini.

December 23rd, 1805

Anthony Fletcher reviews a work on Georgian sex and medicine.

Boria Sax finds modern myth-making at work in the apparently timeless legend of the ravens in the Tower.

Daniel Snowman meets Jeremy Black, prolific chronicler of British, European and worldwide diplomatic, military, cultural and cartographic history, and much else...

Patrick Vernon, a key figure in the Greatest Black Britons campaign, discusses depictions of Blacks in Victorian art and popular culture, and introduces a new...

Retha Warnicke casts a sceptical eye over a work of popular history, while Rob Johnson has enjoyed a new study of modern warfare.

Simon Lemieux shows how a synoptic approach enables us to appreciate the true nature of the Irish Question.

Ian Cawood shows how British policy-makers adapted to the changing world after 1945.

Jamie Oliver is the latest in a long line of food reformers. John Burnett looks at the campaign of the Reform Bread League to improve the nation’s loaf.

Tristram Hunt reviews a timely book on the 19th-century inventor and engineer.

David Anderson looks at the contentious issues raised as Kenya comes to terms with the colonial past.

Simon Henderson places a key figure into the context of modern Russian history.

To coincide with a major new exhibition at Tate Britain on the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, Stella Tillyard asks what fame meant to individuals and the wider...

John Man, author of biographies of Genghis Khan and Attila, traces the journey that took him to Mongolia and Hungary, with a detour to the Gobi, and reveals the...

Tim Harris explores the political spin, intolerance and repression that underlay Charles II’s relaxed image, and which led him into a deep crisis in 1678-81 yet...

Danny Wood visits a remarkable excavation in the Ukraine.

Anne-Marie Kilday and Katherine Watson explore 18th-century child killers, their motivations and contemporary attitudes towards them.

Ray Laurence considers how children were seen in ancient Rome and looks at some of the harsher aspects of childhood – sickness, violence and endless work.

Douglas James explains why so many in the Christian West answered Urban II’s call to arms following the Council of Clermont in 1095.

A seasonal round-up of publications.

Roland Quinault examines the career, speeches and writings of Churchill for evidence as to whether or not he was racist and patronizing to black peoples.

Winston Churchill wrote history with an eye to his eventual place in it, David Reynolds tells us. His idea of history also inspired his making of it.

Jeremy Black reviews a new study which looks at the capacity of past, present and societies to see and respond to impending environmental crises.

Mussolini casts a long shadow. R J.B. Bosworth describes how Italians of both the left and the right have used memories of his long dictatorship to underpin their...

Robert Carr assesses the nature of British rule in India during a key, transitional phase.

Roy Foster introduces a new exhibition on the Irish in London in the 19th and early 20th centuries, opening at the National Portrait Gallery on March 9th.

Peter Furtado introduces the August 2005 issue.

Peter Furtado introduces the February 2005 issue of History Today.

James Robertson investigates the Lord Protector’s ambitious plans for war with Spain in the Caribbean.

Peter Furtado reveals the winners of the Worlfson History Prizes for 2004.

Denise Silvester-Carr describes the trials and tribulations of a fine Georgian House recently re-opened by English Heritage.

David Livingstone reached the Victoria Falls on November 17th, 1855.

Bendor Grosvenor reveals for the first time a letter by Queen Victoria, which sheds light on the true nature of her relationship and feelings for her man-servant John...

Dorothy Wordsworth died on January 25th, 1855, aged eighty-four.

Tamerlane, or Timur, one of history's most brutal butchers, died on February 18th, 1405.

October 25th, 1605

July 13th, 1705

The Russian ruler died of pneumonia on March 2nd, 1855.

Stephen Roberts explodes a popular historical over-simplification.

Geologist and historian Roger Osborne wants to know just what people mean when they use the ‘C’ word.

Andy Lynes announces a new venture by the renowned chef Heston Blumenthal and a team of historians based at Hampton Court Palace who specialise in Tudor cookery.

Donald Zec has written the life of his brother, the wartime political cartoonist Philip Zec, to remind the world of his rich collection of cartoons that caught the...

Martin Evans mourns the loss of Douglas Johnson, doyen of French political history in Britain.

Two books opened classical linguist and historian Peter Jones’s eyes to the nature of the historian’s role.

The twentieth anniversary this month of the 1985 Durham Miner’s Gala, the first to be held after the end of the miners’ strike of 1984-85, will be a time for...

Tom Bowers previews the History Channel’s new series on the Crusades and finds out what is different from previous attempts to put the holy wars on screen.

Jack Lohman, Director of the Museum of London, explains the significance of two Victorian paintings and why the Museum is delighted to have been able to acquire...

Ian Kershaw sees 1945 as a real watershed in Europe’s history of the last century.

Peter Furtado urges history teachers to help mark the 2005 examinations.

Richard Cavendish charts the events leading up to the execution of Marin Falier, Doge of Venice, on April 18th, 1355.

Jon Cook points to the value of school visits for history students.

History Today and the Grierson Trust have together awarded their annual historical film prize to the powerful BBC series Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution...

Peter Furtado reviews the new film, directed and produced by Oliver Hirschbiegel (Momentum Pictures, 155 minutes).

Tom Palaima reviews First Democracy, an analysis of classical Athenian democracy and how the ideals around which it was based compare with the...

Bernhard Rieger considers how luxury liners became icons of modernity and national pride in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Jonathan Fenby asks why the greatest maritime tragedy ever to affect Britain was hushed up at the time and has remained a virtually untold story for sixty-five years...

John Foxe’s graphic and angry work depicting the persecutions inflicted by the Roman Catholic church, was partly a response to the rising tide of intolerance across...

Richard Cavendish marks the anniversary of the union of two branches of the Roosevelts, on March 17th, 1905

Glenn Richardson investigates a work on Gallic history from a British viewpoint.

Richard Cavendish marks the funeral of one of medicine's most eminent pioneers, on March 18th, 1955.

Kevin Kennedy highlights a controversial project to rebuild a one-time Prussian ‘national monument’.

Richard Cavendish describes how Major-General Edward Braddock arrived in Virginia to take command against the French in North America, but was defeated on July 9th...

Kenneth Baker reviews two titles on the vicissitudes of the 18th century.

Kenneth Baker looks at the foibles and achievements of one of Britain’s most controversial monarchs through the eyes of his caricaturists.

Robin Evans focuses on the role of the Basques during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.

Graham Goodlad gives advice to those starting their study of History in the Sixth Form.

David Carpenter recalls the vanished world of the London docks in the 1950s.

David Childs reviews a publication on Tudor seapower.

Peter Furtado introduces the July 2005 issue of History Today.

A late-Roman coin unearthed in an Oxfordshire field and on show in the Ashmolean Museum leads Llewelyn Morgan to ponder the misleading messages on the faces of...

Sean Cunningham highlights the importance of 'rule by recognisance' in the reign of the first Tudor monarch.

Susan-Mary Grant looks at a new biography of George Washington and an indepth study of a formative year in his life - 1776.

The teaching of history in our schools and universities continues to raise questions for historians, teachers, students and parents alike. Peter Furtado reports on...

Richard Evans concludes his two-part account of the Coming of the Third Reich by examining how Hitler’s position, and the state of Germany, was transformed in 1933...

Max Adams investigates the truth behind the introduction of a key invention of the early Industrial Revolution.

Robert Pearce reviews a new title by David Reynolds which looks at how Churchill shaped his own reputation through the writing of his memoirs.

David Culbert visits an exhibition at the Allied (Alliierten) Museum in the former headquarters of the US occupation forces in Berlin.

Simon Chaplin describes the extraordinary personal museum of the 18th-century anatomist and gentleman-dissector John Hunter, and suggests that this, and others...

Graham Goodlad surveys the career of one of the most controversial figures in late Victorian and Edwardian politics.

Following his re-election in 1952, Juan Peron was overthrown on September 19th, 1955.

Julius Caesar first landed in Britain on August 26th, 55 BC, but it was almost another hundred years before the Romans actually conquered Britain in AD 43.

Andy Lynes experiences a colourful and tasty vocation lesson in the history of the Regency period.

Graham Gendall Norton travels in search of those who fought for the rights of all.

October 16th, 1555

In his latest article about today’s historians, Daniel Snowman meets the creator of some of the finest TV history programmes, including Auschwitz, currently being...

Diplomat and traveller Hugh Leach draws on his experience of working with Arab tribes to examine T.E. Lawrence’s strategy in the Arab revolt, in anticipation of a...

Ian Thatcher refuses to take Trotsky at his own valuation.

Comments from our readers on current articles and topics.

History Today readers give their reaction to articles published in the July 2005 issue.

Reader responses to the November and December 2004 issues of History Today.

History Today readers lend us their thoughts on previous articles published in the magazine.

Letters from readers of History Today.

March letters from readers of History Today.

Neil Gregor looks at Germany and the legacies of war.

Bartholomew's Fair, which dates back to the twelth century, was held for the last time on September 3rd, 1855.

Peter Furtado announces the winners of the 2005 Longman-History Today Awards.

Peter Furtado introduces the April 2005 issue of History Today.

Britain's new Prime Minister took office on February 5th, 1855.

Peter Furtado introduces the January 2005 issue of History Today.

Sarah Searight highlights the problem of pillaging for those trying to piece together Mali’s rich heritage.

Julie Rugg reports on recent research done into official attitudes towards burial during the Blitz.

Clive Foss examines two works on China - the personalities and policies.

Richard Pflederer reviews a visual chronicle charting the history of Europe’s discovery of lands to the east.

Martin Evans examines a book which grapples with memory, the ways in which it is used by historians and how the present age remembers and forgets history....

Yehuda Koren tells one family’s remarkable story of surviving Auschwitz.

John Matusiak examines whether a common interpretation can survive detailed scrutiny.

Roger Macdonald’s article Behind the Iron Mask published in our November 2005 issue raised a number of questions. Here he answers some of them, and reveals more...

Sebastian Walsh looks at a forgotten friend and adviser to Queen Elizabeth from the early years of her reign.

Paul Doolan visits a new museum in Geneva that presents the history of Reformed Christianity and Calvinism as a key and positive factor in European history.

Historical novelist Katie Grant delves into her family history for inspiration.

Christopher Woodward considers the continuing power exerted by Napoleon on the French and British during his exile on St Helena up till, and beyond, his death....

Laurent Joffrin looks at the paradoxes surrounding a man who has fascinated the French for two hundred years.

Claire Warrior, of the National Maritime Museum, previews the themes of the exhibition opening on July 7th.

Colin White uncovers a more complex and liberal side to Nelson than was previously appreciated.

Arthur Marwick reviews a new title which re-examines British society during the controversial period between 1956 and 1963.

Alison Barnes reveals a new discovery about the Eddystone lighthouse: the first of its kind to be built on rocks in the sea.

Editor Peter Furtado introduces the latest issue.

Daniel Snowman meets the historian of Poland, Europe and ‘The Isles’.

Jeremy Black reviews a new account of the history of the Baltic from the ice age to the nuclear age.

Stuart Burch considers the significance to Norway – both in terms of the past and the present – of the anniversary of 1905, when the country at last won its...

Jonathan Conlin reads 1066 And All That, a book that served as a point of departure to so many people, seventy-five years after its first publication.

Historian of suburbia Mark Clapson peers over the fences of Wisteria Lane to discover a fifty-year-old myth still at work.

Alex Butterworth looks at the parallels between the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans recently, and the devastation suffered by Pompeii in the...

Mark Roodhouse finds a dark secret in one of the champions of the 1945 Labour landslide.

Mike Huggins investigates the origins of Britain’s morass of sporting rivalries.

Ben Power takes a tour of the London Library, an invaluable resource for historians and History Today, and describes plans for a sensitive expansion beginning this...

In the month in which we commemorate the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, David Nicholas suggests that America’s involvement in northern Europe was unwittingly...

David Welch looks at the way that public art was used in both France and Britain to celebrate Napoleon and Nelson as national heroes, during their lifetimes and...

Robert Pearce looks at a selection of the season’s titles newly out in paperback.

New Year round-up of the latest books.

Kevin Haddick Flynn revisits the career and reassesses the character of this great Irish patriot.

Guy de la Bédoyère, perhaps better known for his work on Roman Britain,  pursues the life of John Evelyn, and his correspondence with Samuel Pepys.

The bride was fifteen and the groom twenty-two, when they married on December 1st, 1655.

Linda Proud explores a biography of a legendary lothario

Nigel Saul looks at a building which embodied much of England’s religious and political life in the later Middle Ages, and which staged the blessing of the...

Paul Dukes examines a book on the sequels to 1945.

Peter Morton reminds us that, a century before Adrian Mole, there was Charles Pooter.

Our annual survey of the range of options available to those wanting to pursue their historical studies at postgraduate level.

Adrian Mourby reveals the thinking behind the new Turks exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Richard Cavendish marks the anniversary of the publication of Dr Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, on April 15th, 1755.

The Guinness Book of Records was first published on August 27th, 1955. In fifty years it sold more than a hundred million copies.

Stephen Roberts reveals the key to enjoying, and succeeding at, the study of the past.

Jim Downs finds that the reasons the Federal government was slow to respond to Hurricane Katrina are rooted in the South’s racial and economic history, and wonders if...

David Prior of the Parliamentary Archives explains why we should be thinking about the Gunpowder Plot unseasonably early, this year.

Benedict King pays personal tribute to a great historian and teacher.

Looking back on the sixtieth anniversary of the surrender of Japan, Rana Mitter finds the political background to the demonstrations in China against Japanese...

Ninety years ago this summer saw the start of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. In his account of the complex historical background to these events Donald Bloxham...

Richard Cavendish remembers the events of December 12th, 1905.

Archaeologist Miles Russell describes recent discoveries which overturn accepted views about the Roman invasion of Britain.

Christopher Duggan explores a publication on a key figure of the Italian Risorgimento.

Trevor Fisher looks at a new biography of Lord Rosebery, the Victorian Liberal who succeeded to the Premiership on the retirement of Gladstone.

Beryl Williams marks the centenary of the revolutionary year 1905, and discusses the impact of the massacre outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, and the...

Ruth Ellis was the last woman hanged for murder in Britain. She was excecuted on July 13th, 1955.

Seán Lang tells of the Dufferin Fund, an aristocratic initiative supported by Queen Victoria to improve medical conditions, particularly in childbirth, for Indian...

Murray Watson looks at the historical roots of a phenomenon few commentators have noted: the sizeable English presence in Scotland.

Party strategists are no new phenomenon, Dominic Wring says; the Labour Party has always been concerned with marketing its brand image.

Ian Bottomley introduces an exhibition which reflects a special moment in Anglo-Japanese relations in the 17th century, echoed today by a unique loan arrangement...

Maxine Berg looks at the commercial battle to dominate Europe that ran alongside the wars with France, and the product revolution that gave Britain the edge in...

Ralph Griffiths commemorates the recently deceased historian of medieval Wales and Britishness.

Editor Peter Furtado welcomes readers to the start of a new year with History Today.

James Barker on ‘Bomber’ Harris, the RAF’s wartime bombing campaign of Germany, and propaganda.

Editor Peter Furtado rounds up the latest history titles published this season.

Godfrey Hodgson tells the colourful story of Jane McManus, political journalist, land speculator, pioneer settler in Texas and propagandist who believed that the...

At court, the twelve days of Christmas were a time for politics, intrigue and manoeuvre as well as for merry-making. Leanda de Lisle explores the mixed feelings...

As thousands of pupils prepare for their exam results, Richard Willis describes the origins of school examinations in England.

Anne Kershen looks at the background to a significant benchmark in British anti-immigration legislation.

David Ellwood reviews a publication on the history of Gallic enmity towards the United States.

Mark Bryant contines his exploration of significant cartoons and caricature with a look at a German magazine that published some of the bravest satirical critiques...

The Magyars of Hungary were defeated by an army led by Otto I, on August 10th, 955.

Anthony Pollard, on the 550th anniversary of the battle of St Albans, describes what happened, and asks whether the battle should rightly be seen as the launch of the...

Ole J. Benedictow describes how he calculated that the Black Death killed 50 million people in the 14th century, or 60 per cent of Europe’s entire population....

Derek Wilson explores the myths and truths about the famous family, whose fortunes were so closely connected to the Tudor dynasty.

Robin Milner-Gulland reviews a new title which explores the history, cultures, and politics of the Black Sea area.

John MacKenzie samples two new works on the maritime history of Britain.

Mihir Bose samples a work on an infamous massacre in the Raj in 1919.

Richard Grayson reveals the human side to a wartime Cabinet minister’s personal tragedy.

Juliet Gardiner discusses a new exhibition on the experiences of children in the Second World War, which opens at the Imperial War Museum on March 18th.

Andrew MacLennan reviews a pocket-guide for those interested in Churches

Phil Reed, Director of the new Churchill Museum, gives a personal insight into the development of the new museum housed in the Cabinet War Rooms, which opens to...

Charles Freeman explores a title on the Ancient world until the fall of the Roman empire.

Simon Underdown reviews a detailed account of the evolution of apes and humans, from Proconsul to the australopithecines, and Homo erectus to the Neanderthals...

Nigel Falls describes how France became caught up in an unexpectedly complicated imperial adventure in 1830.

Edward the Confessor, the last truly Anglo-Saxon King, was remembered with such affection he became a sainted embodiment of a pacific and idealistic form of...

September 19th, 1905

Robert Johnson puts the decline of a once-great Empire into an international context.

February 2nd, 1555

Bryan Ward-Perkins finds that archaeology offers unarguable evidence for an abrupt ending.

Wood reviews The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History by Peter Heather and...

The exhibition that opened in Paris, on October 15th, 1905, 'shocked many who saw, and many more who did not.'

Peter Furtado introduces the June 2005 issue of History Today.

Nigel Jones reviews a work on the Great War.

Rhoads Murphey reflects on a thousand years of Turkic cultural development.

The organisation which would become the poltical arm of the Irish Republican Army was founded as a nationalist pressure group on November 28th, 1905.

Martin Evans and Emmanuel Godin ask how close was France to becoming a Communist country in the years after the Second World War.

Tim Benson, founder of the Political Cartoon Society, introduces his ten favourite cartoons published in Britain.

Pauline Croft explains the origins of Bonfire Night by reconstructing events 400 years ago.

Simon Adams investigates the political and religious options available to the Catholics of early Jacobean England, and asks why some chose to attempt the...

Nigel Saul explores a new general history of Dark Age Britain

Andrew Fisher asks who William Wallace really was, and why he has become an icon of Scottish resistance to the English.

Richard Almond deciphers the meaning of a set of illuminations illustrating an unusual Book of Hours made in Germany around the year 1500.

Helen Rappaport on Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale and the Post-Crimean War reputation of the woman recently voted ‘greatest black Briton’: Mary Seacole....

Andrew Cook takes a look at the Duke of Clarence, grandson of Queen Victoria, who is most often remembered as a wastrel who died young, and is sometimes mentioned as...

From Godwin to Warwick to Leicester: for more than a thousand years the English earls have been key players in many of the great events of English history.  But...

Andrew Pettegree reviews a book on the Reformation.

Miri Rubin reviews a title on medieval-era queens.

Peter Furtado introduces the September 2005 issue.

Jenifer Roberts recalls the impact of an earlier tidal wave, which brought chaos and disaster to Portugal 250 years ago.

Peter Furtado introduces a history-lovers’ festival with a difference.

John Mason reviews the book and DVD of the recent Mitchell and Kenyon BBC documentary based on rare Edwardian film.

Patricia Fara marks two significant Einstein anniversaries and points out some contradictions in the reputation of this great scientific hero.

Mihir Bose investigates the case of Subhas Chandra Bose in Bengal in 1924 to show what can happen when a government is able to lock people up on the suspicion of...

Cartoon historian Mark Bryant examines the origins of caricature itself, and the ambivalent attitude to it of the man whose name has become synonymous with the...

Between February 13th and 15th, 1945, British and American bombers dropped nearly 4,000 tonnes of bombs on the refugee-crammed city of Dresden. David Spark ...

In the twenty-eighth and final essay in this series, Daniel Snowman meets John Morrill, historian of the Civil War, Oliver Cromwell and the recurrent political...

A rebellion erupted on the Russian battleship Potemkin on June 14th, 1905

Jonathan Marwil describes the eye-opening experience of three young Americans who went to report from the battlefields of the Italian War of Independence.

Elizabeth Sparrow unpicks the origins of the long-standing belief that Penzance, in Cornwall, was the first place on the mainland to receive news of the victory at...

Geoffrey Parker examines the reasons Philip II of Spain was drawn into a lengthy and bitter conflict with his Low Country provinces.

Judy Urquhart recalls a forgotten use of Colditz Castle after the end of the Second World War – as a prison for German aristocrats.

Alexander Orlov, veteran of the Great Patriotic War, provides a Russian perspective on the battle for Berlin, and the controversies that have surrounded it as the...

Sarah Parker has curated an exhibition on the extraordinary ‘village’ community inhabiting Grace and Favour apartments at Hampton Court Palace, which, for the...

Rodney Shirley samples a new reproduction of the 16th century atlas commissioned by Mary I.

Ronald Hutton introduces a new book which explores the extent of shamanism among ancient European peoples from the Stone Age to the early post-...

Paul Dukes assesses the roles of the major statesmen from Britain, the USA and the USSR during the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War.

Umej Bhatia discusses Muslim memories of the Crusades and their resonances in Middle Eastern politics today.

Sarah Minney, a genealogist-researcher, solves the mystery of the later life of a famous black beauty of the late 18th century.

The two halves of the railway tunnel linking Switzerland and Italy met on April 2nd, 1905.

Vincent Barnett contrasts Marxist idealism with the changing economic reality in the USSR.

David Boyle looks at a new comparitive study of the three Richards who ruled England in the Middle Ages.

Alvin Jackson commends a new study of twentieth-century Ireland.

Judith Richards pinpoints the debts of Elizabeth I to her older half-sister.

Peter Furtado introduces this issue of the magazine and reminds us of the importance of taking a long view of history.

The mutual defence treaty between Communist states was signed on May 14th, 1955.

Patricia Fara considers a new title which looks at the attempts to reconcile faith with the emerging conclusions of science in the late seventeenth and...

Simon Henderson explains the significance of Hans and Sophie Scholl in the history of Nazi Germany.

Merchant Ivory’s latest film White Countess tells the story of a high-born Russian woman reduced to poverty and prostitution to support her family – refugees of the...

Charlotte Crow visits the new World Museum Liverpool, which has been newly refurbished in time for the city’s big year, 2008, when it will wear the mantle of...

Robin Evans assesses the contribution of the Welsh to the troubles of 1642-49.

David Gimson describes a school trip with a difference: from Oxford to Japan to see how another country deals with its own contested and painful past, and to develop...

Mark Rathbone considers why American trade unionism was so violent for much of 1865-1980 but so much more peaceful by the mid-twentieth century.

As preparations are made for Saddam Hussein’s trial in Iraq, Clive Foss examines the precedents for bringing tyrants to justice and finds the process fraught with...

Roland Quinault finds alarming parallels for the recent London bomb attacks in the 1880s.

Patrick McNally introduces an institution in the Midlands of growing national importance.

Mark Rathbone assesses the effectiveness of measures taken in Tudor England to meet the problems of poverty and vagrancy.

Chris Wrigley commends Victorians by Ruth Brocklehurst - winner of the Longman-History Today New Generation award.

May 2005 is going to be noteworthy for at least two reasons – the general election and the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe.

Lawrence Freedman describes how he came to write the official history of the Falklands campaign and tells us what he learned from the experience.

Historians have often stressed the modernity of America’s Civil War. Yet Gervase Phillips argues that the dependence on often weary, sickly horses on both sides in...

Andy Lawrence insists that we must think for ourselves to unravel one of the great historical conundrums.

Jon Latimer reviews a publication on the epic battle which proved to be a crucial turning point in history.

Juliet Gardiner examines a new exploration of the sources, and shaping, of cultural identity in Britain in the twentieth century.

History Today readers select the greatest political cartoon of all time.

David Culbert assesses a new book based on interviews with ordinary Germans and German Jews who lived through the Nazi era.

Clive Foss looks at the way in which Kemal Atatürk rewrote history as part of his radical modernization of the Turkish nation.

Tony Williams reviews a timely biography of the great author.

Richard Cust reassesses the thinking behind the biggest military blunder of the English Civil War, Charles I’s decision to fight the New Model Army at Naseby in...

Alan Farmer explains why the North won the American Civil War.

Geoffrey Best considers Winston Churchill’s growing alarm about the possibility of nuclear war, and his efforts to ensure that its horrors never happened.

P. G. Maxwell-Stuart admires a new study of the psychology behind German witchcraft and its persecution in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This month marks the 100th anniversary of St Petersburg’s Bloody Sunday. The Manchester Guardian was there, as Charlotte Alston describes.

Archaeologist Chris Scarre finds fascination in discovering the past by examining its material remains.

Colin Seymour-Ure commends a unique record of World War II.

About 200 people died and 800 were wounded during the march led by Father George Gapon on January 22nd, 1905.

R.E. Foster shows that we should know more of Perceval than the manner of his untimely death.

Cartoon historian Mark Bryant examines significant cartoons and caricatures from the history of the genre, in Britain and overseas and from the 18th century...

Len Scales considers the complex role of martial skill in the development of national identity in the Middle Ages.