History Today

Scents; cosmetics; essences: D.C.S. Wiltshire finds that enormous variety for the unguents were produced in fashionable Roman world.

Philip Baker reassesses an article from 1967 on Cromwell and the Levellers, which challenged the orthodoxies of the times.

Stephen Cooper and Ashley Cooper consider how the deeds of Richard III, still controversial today, were judged by his contemporaries.

D.E. Moss introduces a Cambridge scholar who was tutor to Princess Elizabeth, an observant traveller in Germany and the author of books on archery and education.

Prudence Hannay profiles a sporting magnate in the midland shires; Viscont Althorp was also a Radical Whig who piloted through the House of Commons the Reform Bill of 1832.

Mary Delorme takes the reader on a historical visit to Whaddon-in-Semington.

Douglas Hilt introduces the scholar, innovator and agricultural reformer, Pablo de Olavide, who brought to Spain the ideas of the French Enlightenment.

Len Ortzen describes the Coup d’etat in Paris which prepared the way for the Second Empire.

When the founders of the American Historical Society discussed their plans in 1791, writes Elisabeth Linscott, they determined ‘to seek and find, to preserve and communicate’, the precious records of their country’s past.

A new project to analyse the Hearth Tax returns of early modern London and Middlesex offers a revealing portrait of a growing but divided city in the midst of cataclysmic crises. Vanessa Harding explains.