History Today

The Japanese Emperor Hirohito, introduced by Richard Storry.

This month History Today publishes the first in a new regular series of bibliographical essays on a wide variety of historiographical topics. The idea of the series is to survey the subject and to provide a guide to the most important and most recent books about it. In the first of the series, Douglas Johnson looks at the French Revolution.

Hugh Rank is intrigued but bewildered by an exhibition on the rise of Prussia, held in a Berlin still coming to terms with its legacy.

Huw Richards on the rise and fall of the media voice of UK radicalism.

In the Georgian age the insane came to be seen not as a threat to society but as its victims. Roy Porter shows however that, in treating the mad with greater compassion, contemporary practice was often to deny the voice of the spiritual.

J.K. Elliott argues that only the evidence of the New Testament, highly selective as it is, gets us close to the character of St Peter and to the events of his life

D.G. Chandler concludes our year-long survey of the nature of military history.

Michael Howard on the culture of imperial Britain in the face of international competition in the economic and military spheres.

The popular revolts of 1578-79 and 1586-89 in Normandy were triggered by an unruly military presence and the high level of royal fiscal exactions. Joan Davies shows how the revolts were exploited by the nobility in their struggle with Henri III, who met the threat thus posed with force.