Early Modern (16th-18thC)

J. Hurstfield analyses social conditions in the Elizabethan age.

Gibraltar, writes Charles Dimont, provides one of the examples of how the British Empire was “acquired in a fit of absence of mind.” 

In the 1800s Rome became a microcosm for great power rivalries. E.L. Devlin describes a case of ambassadorial privilege that caused controversy between the papacy and the king of France.

Than the Younger Pitt, there is no lonelier, yet more commanding, figure among British Prime Ministers. By R.J. White.

S.M. Toyne investigates how, from earliest times, the migration of the herring has exercised an important influence on the history of the peoples living around the North Sea and the Baltic.

In 1952, the Society of Friends celebrated its tercentenary. One of the Quakers' greatest achievements was the founding of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1681. By Henry J. Cadbury.

The tall army recruits known as the Potsdam Giants, F.L. Carsten writes, played a considerable part in the British diplomacy during the early 18th century, and the efforts of the Prussian recruiting sergeants to procure men of the desired size extended to the British Isles.

S.M. Toyne draws upon Guy Fawkes’ background in an effort to better understand his single-minded motivation.

Only a staff composed of men of military genius, and backed by a decisive and imaginative government at Westminster, could have secured a victory in the American War of Independence. Eric Robson reflects on how men of considerable talent, and of much good-will, failed in an impossible task.

Da Vinci's scientific observations proved inseperable from his intentions as a painter, Kenneth Clark writes. But as a disciple of experience ahead of his time, the impracticability of Da Vinci's visions would come to haunt him.

Victoria Gardner looks back at earlier attitudes to Britain’s press freedom and how the withdrawal of the Licensing Act of 1662 spawned a nation of news addicts.

The wedding of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V took place on February 14th 1613.

N.P. Macdonald explains how modern Brazil owes its extensive frontiers, and the discovery of many of its natural riches, to the journeys far inland, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of pioneers in search of slaves.