History Today

Tinseltown pioneers founded the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company on December 22nd, 1913.

The rebirth of one of the world's great buildings took place on December 24th, 563.

To be present where so many are now absent offers students a profound insight into the realities of history, argues Tom Jackson.

Should one of the greatest of Welsh treasures be returned to the country in which it was found? David R. Howell investigates.

The history of the Bayreuth Festival, the annual celebration of the music of Richard Wagner, is mired in controversy and scandal, as Mark Ronan reports.

Though UK governments rejected US requests to send troops to Vietnam, Britain did not stay out of the war, says Marc Tiley.

In his youth hailed by Carlyle as a “new Mystic,” later acclaimed by his contemporaries as the “saint of rationalism,” John Stuart Mill was an extraordinarily versatile writer. Maurice Cranston profiles a man of very wide interests, who became the personification of Victorian liberal democracy and “the agnostic’s equivalent of a godfather” to the infant Bertrand Russell.

A manager of men and a master of contemporary politics, writes Esmond Wright, Dundas was Pitt's energetic colleague “during the most critical years in British history except for 1940”—not a hero, but a vigorous man of affairs who “rendered some service to both his countries.”

M.J. Sydenham describes how, returning from the Colonies “with a most dreadful antipathy towards the government and nation”, this one-time highwayman conceived the scheme of striking a dramatic blow for America”.

Often expelled, the Jesuits have as often returned. The unpopularity they excited was largely due to the power they exercised. How they came to acquire so much influence, writes E.E.Y. Hales, is “certainly one of the enigmas of history”.