Foreword
‘Though an historian cannot foretell the future, he is probably better qualified than most men to understand his own time’
January 1951 seems a particularly appropriate moment to launch a new historical magazine. Every adult alive today – more especially those of us whose memories reach back to the period before 1914 – can claim to have lived through one of the most astonishing phases of recorded history. During the last fifty years powerful states have risen and fallen, potent political doctrines have been shaped and thrown aside, Europe has been violently torn into Eastern and Western spheres of influence.
At home we have witnessed gigantic changes. Our class structure has been remodelled, our social institutions have been rebuilt and our imperial prospects revolutionised. We have shed immense areas of our former possessions – with greater celerity and fewer complaints than any previous empire – and have granted virtual independence to vast outlying territories. The map of the world we admired in the school room wore an imposing belt of British red. It is a very different map we examine at the present day.
These changes have been bewilderingly swift: they have sharpened our sense of historical perspective and heightened our appreciation of the national heritage that westill preserve. Though an historian cannot foretell the future, he is probably better qualified than most men to understand his own time: he knows that the same causes will produce the same effects, but that no period is ever precisely identical with the period that comes before it: each age has an individual mood to be analysed and re-interpreted.
History Today is devoted to the study of history – of history in the widest meaning. It will be written by experts, and it will cover many specialised subjects; but the main intention of the magazine is to interest the general reader. Besides the analysis of historical trends, both in the New and in the Old World, it will include detailed portraits of outstanding men and women, essays on literature, science and art and on the contribution they have made to the international background, accounts of economic development and a series of articles dealing with the origins and growth of British towns and cities. There is scarcely a square mile of Great Britain that cannot produce historical treasure. Like open-cast miners, but more gently and more beneficently, we hope to bring that wealth into mid-twentieth-century daylight.
