History Today

The third President of the United States had been the first American Minister in Paris; Stuart Andrews describes how, to the end of his life, he was a faithful disciple of the French Enlightenment.

Born in the West Indies; Secretary of State in the Confederate Government, Benjamin ended his career as a successful barrister in London. By Charles Curran.

In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from Tsar Alexander II at a price of just two cents an acre. What brought Russia’s American empire to such an ignominious end?

Throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, writes Robert G. Weisbord, the idea of a return to Africa stirred the imagination of Negro leaders in the United States.

In 1513 the Spaniards reached Florida; Louis C. Kleber describes how fifty years later the French followed them.

George Woodcock describes how, during the century that followed the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in Britain, servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company explored the Canadian west and the Arctic regions.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as Tocqueville perceptively remarked, Russia and the United States had grown to nationhood almost unnoticed. ‘The world learned of their existence and their greatness at almost the same time’. By Paul Dukes.

Nick Lloyd revisits John Terraine’s article on the decisive Allied victory at Amiens in 1918 and asks why this remarkable military achievement is not as well known as the first day of the Somme.

Andrew Higgott surveys the contested legacy of modern architecture in Britain from the first machine age to the dawn of the digital.