History Today

During the years before the French Revolution, writes D.M. Walmsley, Mesmer’s treatment of patients by 'animal magnetism' in some ways foreshadowed the methods of modern pyschiatry.

For the landed gentry at the end of the eighteenth century, writes J.F.G. Gornall, there were two main components in marriage. Jane Austen’s novels reveal how 'equal alliance' was at least as important as mutual affection.

In 1680, writes Joanna Richardson, the mistress of Louis XIV was concerned in a scandal that involved both poisoning and black magic.

“He resigned.” Sir Winston Churchill has written of his father, “at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and he made no attempt to rally support.” By Robert Rhodes James.

Cyril Falls profiles perhaps the ideal soldier in war and, certainly, the ideal British Commander-in-Chief.

Only in a free political society, declared Lamennais and his followers, could nineteenth-century Catholics hope to evangelize the new age. Complete religious liberty, with disestablishment of the Church, freedom of education and of the press, and the decentralization of governmental authority, writes J.B. Morrall, were among the aims they advocated. His views having been condemned by the Vatican and himself denounced by conservative critics as “Robespierre in a surpliceLamennais at length abandoned the faith to which he had devoted so much talent and energy.

The exploits of his youngest brother frequently disturbed Napoleon; but, writes Owen Connolly, of all the brother-kings, Jerome was the most useful to him, the most soldierly and the most loyal.

Patrick Renshaw introduces an archetypal twentieth century figure: the American Trade Unionist who fled to Russia and who Comintern believed they could use to lead an American Bolshevik revolution.

To the victors in the Ministerial Crisis of 1886 went twenty years of power, writes Robert Rhodes James, while to the loser there only remained a poignant struggle against denigration and disease.

Engineer, journalist, inventor, Herbert Spencer became one of the most influential prophets of the Victorian Age. J.W. Burrow describes how his Synthetic Philosophy was an encyclopedic attempt to construct a system of “unified knowledge,” in which the facts of Darwinian natural science were blended with transcendental metaphysics.