A 75th Anniversary Letter from the Editors

The January 2026 issue marks the 75th anniversary of History Today’s first publication in January 1951. In a 1986 profile, the Guardian noted that ‘few magazines can have been launched with a more silvery spoon’ – a fair judgement: History Today was the initiative of Winston Churchill’s wartime minister of information, Brendan Bracken, and was possibly named by the prime minister himself. It was published to acclaim under the co-editorship of Peter Quennell and Alan Hodge (and enters its 75th year under a co-editorship, too). The magazine’s aim was to make sense of a world undergoing ‘bewilderingly swift’ change and to foster Churchill’s vision of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’: to mine history and present it to the public in ‘mid-twentieth century daylight’. They were soon reporting a large readership. ‘I find all this very encouraging’, Churchill reportedly told his doctor, Lord Moran: ‘It would appear that not everyone in England reads the Daily Mirror.’ Churchill is among the key figures of the ‘age’ to appear in this month’s cover story, ‘Tito: Britain’s Man in Belgrade’, which evokes the postwar world into which the magazine was born, now cast in 21st-century daylight that offers nuanced hindsight rather than uncertain hope.

In 1981 History Today became independent and remains so, one of the few magazines on the newsstand to be reliant on its readers – there is no more silver spoon, but also no benefactors to appease. When we took over the editorship in 2022 we felt the weight of the responsibility of producing a magazine with its own rich history at a time when print media was suffering what has often been described as a precipitous decline (and are glad to have found that reports of its death exaggerated). Our sentiments on this significant anniversary mirror those expressed by Quennell and Hodge in their second editorial from February 1951:

‘The Editors of History Today wish to record their gratitude to readers and contributors – to readers for an extremely kind reception: to contributors both for the quality of articles submitted and for the remarkable punctuality.’

You can buy the 75th anniversary issue of History Today here.