History Today

The historical partnership between Germany and Turkey is arguably the most paradoxical, if unavoidable, in modern Europe.

‘I can solve one historical mystery? I’d like to have proven that Hernán Cortés murdered his first wife.’

The Bayeux Tapestry may be back in England, but it is a Norman artwork. For Anglo-Saxon voices, we need to look elsewhere.

The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling From the Dawn of Print to the 21st Century by Andrew Pettegree reveals the hard graft and innovation behind the book trade.

In 1935 Turkmen farmers rode their horses 4,300 kilometres across the Soviet Union to impress Moscow.

Desk Revolutionaries: The Men of the French Directory, 1795-9 by Biancamaria Fontana sets the record straight on the French Revolution’s great experiment in governance.

The consequences of Carthusian defiance showed the brutality of the dissolution of the monasteries.

The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan finds a continent powerless before a capricious United States. Is it too late to teach an old world new tricks?

Sailors looking for work in the 19th century risked getting crimped – or shanghaied – and caught in a whirlpool of exploitation and corruption.