History Today

Beethoven's only opera was performed for the first time on May 23rd, 1814.

The French theologian died on May 27th, 1564.

One of the bloodiest and most decisive battles in Irish history took place a thousand years ago this month.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, writes Patricia McCollom, the French made a resolute attempt to seize the rich Canadian fur-lands.

For several generations, writes Arnold Whitridge, Americans thought it inevitable that the Canadian provinces would join the United States.

Robert Cecil describes how the preacher’s influence in the years before the American Revolution was as great as that of the press, and in New England probably greater.

On the day that the Bastille was stormed, writes George Woodcock, the explorer Mackenzie stood on the Canadian Arctic shore at the mouth of the river that now bears his name.

As Governor and Senator, Huey Long, established a radical dictatorship in his native Louisiana; Peter J. King writes how, at the time of his death, Long was nourishing nation-wide ambitions.

In the year after ‘Mr. Madison’s War’, writes W.I. Cunningham, three Massachusetts businessmen helped to transfer the Industrial Revolution from England to America.

Though Paul Jones’s landing at Whitehaven did comparatively little real damage, writes Louis C. Kleber, ‘the shock to official and public sensitivities... was enormous’.