History Today

The first English ship reached Japan in 1613. Michael Cooper describes how the Chief Factor of the East India Company recorded some reminiscences.

Barrington’s admiration for the humanity, wit and decisiveness of his chief are affectionately apparent in this portrait of the great Whig Prime Minister at the height of his powers.

A further selection from a memoir Barrington composed towards the close of his life and transmitted to his kinsman, the third Earl of Durham. Through his connections with leading political families, and official appointments he held at 10 Downing Street and the Treasury, Barrington was in an excellent position from which to observe and comment on the personalities of the nineteenth century including Brougham, Melbourne, Peel and Gladstone.

Because of his vision of New Amsterdam as the most important city on the Atlantic seaboard, writes Arnold Whitridge, Stuyvesant stands out in American history as the most memorable of the colonial governors.

George Woodcock gives an account of an Imperial enterprise in south-east Asia.

Until the mid seventeenth century, writes L.W. Cowie, the nave of old St Paul’s Cathedral was an active centre of commerce.

Joanna Richardson describes how after he had moved to Paris, Jacques Offenbach, the son of a cantor at the synagogue in Cologne, created an operatic epitome of the Second Empire.

For some sixty years during the eighteenth century, writes Sarah Searight, Louisiana was a colony owing allegiance to the King of France.

General and trooper alike, Napoleon's cavalry brought a superb panache to the drab business of war. James Lunt describes how, for fifteen years, there was “hardly a village in Europe between Moscow and Madrid” through which these dashing horsemen did not ride.

Napoleon’s attempt to form a second and more liberal empire was, like Waterloo, a close-run thing and “came nearer to success than is usually allowed.”