History Today

After the upheavals of 1688, England’s shifting social order needed new ways to define itself. A taste for fine claret became one such marker of wealth and power, as Charles Ludington explains.

A stylish, traditional take on the Enlightenment is unlikely to convert many one way or the other.

A rare, and successful, attempt to reconstruct the experiences and emotions of parenting in the past.

Enter our crossword and win the audiobook The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World’s Greatest Empire

New contributions to the huge volume of 'Wildeana'.

In the latest cartoon from Adrian Teal, Johnson and Boswell visit the Soviet Union. 

According to Nazi ideology a Jew, even one who had died for Germany in the First World War, was not a real German.

This month's quiz features questions on the death of Abraham Lincoln, a long-running civil war and a famed historian's alter ego.

Terence O’Brien recounts how some women served with their husbands in the Crimean War as cooks, laundresses and nurses to the Regiment.

Gerald Morgan recounts how, towards the mid-nineteenth century, Russian expansion in Central Asia prompted the authorities in India to send British Missions in reply.

Though dull in places and difficult to translate, Hugh Thomas writes, Don Quixote’s refreshing realism once made Cervantes the most widely read foreign writer in England. But will his most famous work endure as literature?

Anthony Pagden describes how, in the sixteenth century, a Spanish bishop of Yucatan was active in preserving and also in destroying the records of Maya civilization.

Long a beautiful feature of the English landscape, William Seymour explains how forests have played an important part in the economic history of Great Britain.