History Today

Still standing: the pillars of Sirwah’s temple.

Yemen’s Endangered Treasures

The current conflict in southern Arabia is threatening one of the most remarkable sites of the region’s pre-Islamic civilisations.

Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni, with Views of Lecco by Giuseppe Molteni and Massimo d’Azeglio, 1835.

The Past Made Flesh

Jerome de Groot muses on how authors of historical fiction try to flesh out the bare bones of history, drawing on old and new works.

Peter the Great's Special Book

The reforming Tsar sought to westernise his empire, yet in 1723 he published an uncompromising reassertion of his absolutist doctrine, which has traditionally marked Russia’s national consciousness.

Richard Burton dies in Trieste

The explorer died on October 20th 1890.

RAF Display, 1934

Roger Hudson describes advances in British military aviation technology in the years before the Second World War.

The Thames Tunnel, designed by the Brunels, under construction, illustration, 1828.

Technology Capital Then and Now

Britain’s Industrial Revolution is most closely associated with the Midlands and the North. But the capital was also a centre of innovation and enterprise, as David Waller explains.

African-American suffragist Nannie Helen Burroughs, far left, at the Banner State Woman’s National Baptist Convention in 1915

Slavery, Women’s Suffrage and the American Civil War

As calls for women’s suffrage gained momentum following the Civil War, an uncomfortable racial faultline emerged dividing white suffragists from their African-American sisters.

Premiere of The Great Dictator

Chaplin's celebrated film first appeared on 15 October 1940.

The servant finds the dying Wether in a scene from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Jan Evert Grave, 1787. Rijksmuseum. Public Domain.

The Media’s First Moral Panic

Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was blamed for a spate of suicides during the ‘reading fever’ of the 1700s. It set a trend for manufactured outrage that is with us still.

Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie on horseback, by Walter Mittelholzer, c. February 1934. ETH Library Zurich. Public Domain.

In the Court of Haile Selassie

Three very different writers – Evelyn Waugh, Wilfred Thesiger, and Ryszard Kapuscinski – reported on the court of Haile Selassie during his reign, producing contrasting accounts of Ethiopia’s emperor.