History Today

Hertha Ayrton’s experiment in a bathtub may have saved lives in the trenches, but it caused ripples among the ranks of the Royal Society.

‘What’s the most exciting field in history today? Native American history – the Native nations have only begun to tell their histories.’

‘I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer’: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column by Mary Beth Norton reveals the 17th-century origins of the agony aunt.

How should we see the natural world? For Descartes it was a mechanism, but a wondrous one.

How did a Gulf backwater become a global powerbroker? Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Commins explores the uneasy alliance between oil, autocracy, and Wahhabism.

Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some controversy.

In Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England Hillary Taylor listens in the archives for the voices of ordinary people.

How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident.

On 5 July 1852 the curtain was raised on Barney Barnato, one of the richest men in South Africa.

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received.