History Today

Christopher Weaver describes how one of the creators of modern Soviet Russia met a hideous death in Mexico.

Maurice Bond analyses the changing landscape of primary source historical research in Britain.

Sudie Duncan Sides explores plantation life in the Southern states before the American Civil War.

Bernard Pool introduces Secretary to James, Duke of York, 1660-7, and a Commissioner for the Navy.

A.W. Palmer describes how the troubled politics of Serbia played a large part in precipitating the first World War. By a policy of violence and assassination, a group of army conspirators, known as the “Black Hand,” laid a fuse to the Balkan powder-keg.

From her post as governess to a prosperous middle-class Russian family, writes Stephen Usherwood, a gifted young Englishwoman watched the gradual development of the Revolution.

After reading an article first published in History Today in 2004, Jeremy Treglown is struck by how much more complex our view of the Spanish Civil War has become in just a decade. 

Christopher Smith revels in reappraisals of both Augustus 2,000 years after his death and of Cleopatra, the so-nearly queen of Rome.

Our conceptions of time have become more accurate but less personal, says Mathew Lyons.

Diaries from Robert Scott’s Terra Nova expedition shed new light on the deaths at the South Pole. Was a scandal silenced in the name of myth-making?