History Today

David Woodward describes how the Confederacy's hope of continuing to exist depended upon gaining command of the sea and of vital coastal and inland waters.

On April 20th, 1770, writes W. Charnley, Captain James Cook, commissioned to observe the transit of Venus, first watched the shores of Australia rising slowly above the westward horizon.

Maurice Hutt offers a study of the secret operations conducted from Jersey by which the British Government kept in touch with the royalist Chouans and spied on French designs.

Besides administering the sub-continent, British public servants devoted endless time and energy to making a record of Indian archaeological remains. Mildred Archer describes the role of the East India Company from 1785-1858.

Victor Allan describes the Cambridge tutor in mathematics, friend of Charles Lamb, who became the first Englishman to walk the streets of the Tibetan capital.

For five years, writes Owen S. Connolly, Jnr., in the face of Allied intervention, Napoleon's talented and amiable older brother attempted to govern the Spanish people.

On the eve of the Treaty of Amiens, writes D.G. Chandler, the French Army was eliminated from Egypt, and news of the victory heartened the British public.

Having lost hope of invading the British Isles, in 1797 the French Directory made a bold attempt to cut off their enemy's East-Indian trade routes. The agent they chose was Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant young general, D.G. Chandler writes, already fascinated by the Eastern scene.

Reputed to be a place of enormous wealth and during the seventeenth century known as “the golden isle”, Madagascar, before it achieved its independence, was long the subject of contention between French and British empire-builders.

After the collapse of France in 1940, writes Geoffrey Warner, “French Parliamentary democracy perished at the hands of a man who had mastered its every art”.