History Today

Aged 48 or 49, the king died at Newark Castle on 19 October 1216.

Kate Wiles explores a unique nautical chart, designed to be understood only by its creator.

Walatta Petros was a woman feared even by kings. Wendy Laura Belcher tells the story of the Ethiopian saint, her relationships with centuries of monarchs and the stories of the miracles she performed.

A family planning clinic opened in New York on 16 October 1916. It lasted only a few days.

Witnessing the slow decline of his native Sicily, the last Prince of Lampedusa saw both blame and possible salvation in the island’s unique location and history, writes Alexander Lee.

How the collapse of the world he knew and loved in 1914 later made the promising young scholar and diplomat into one of the most extraordinary and controversial historians of our time.

Since the early 1960s, historians have shone a more positive light on the Battle of the Somme. But we must not forget the excesses and failures of that terrible campaign.  

One of the grandest, certainly one of the largest, manuscripts produced in the medieval West, the Codex Amiatinus is often overlooked as an Anglo-Saxon treasure. Conor O’Brien shows how its makers used it to assert their identity and to establish their place firmly within the Christian world.

Evidence from Britain’s First World War conscription tribunals reveals a surprisingly efficient and impartial system, as Rebecca Pyne-Edwards Banks asserts in this extract from her 2015 undergraduate dissertation prize-winning essay.   

Since it was founded in 1948, the issue of how Britons have laughed with – or at – the NHS reveals much about changes in society.