History Today

Of all the measures undertaken by President Peron, none was more popular in Argentina than the nationalization of the British-owned railway system.

A series of cases over a period of sixty years had raised the question of whether juries could pronounce on the substance of charges of libel and sedition or merely on the facts of publication. H.M. Lubasz writes how Fox’s Libel Act of 1791 put an end to doubt and thereby admitted the public to a larger vote in political affairs.

Of the British officers who fell at Waterloo, writes Antony Brett-James, none was more distinguished than General Sir Thomas Picton.

The legend that Babeuf had created and the doctrines of Babouvism became a powerful force in nineteenth-century Europe. W.J. Fishman writes how, among those whom it inspired, were the authors of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Thin, pale, solitary, a day-dreamer, opinionated, rebellious, with sudden bursts of energy that quickly evaporated, D.C. Watt writes that Hitler as a boy is a strange forerunner of the would-be world-conqueror.

“Treat the Pope as though he had an army of 200,000 men"—Napoleon. By E.E.Y. Hales.

For forty years, ruler of an alien country, Mohammed Ali attempted a revolution from which Egypt might have emerged into the twentieth century “as a small-scale Japan.”  

Lenin’s return to Russia by German agency in April 1917, writes David Woodward, was one of the turning points in 20th-century history.

Christopher Lloyd profiles a highly successful businessman of modest and abstemious habits, John Julius Angerstein, who formed a magnificent collection, the nucleus of London’s National Gallery, at his house in Pall Mall.

During the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Ascendancy in Ireland, writes William D. Griffin, was dominated by Lord Clare, a figure both reviled and admired.