History Today

Europe knew little about black Africa, writes Steven R. Smith, until the trading voyages of the late sixteenth century.

William Seymour describes how a large area of Dorset and Wiltshire, abounding in deer, was hunted by King John and granted to Robert Cecil by James I.

At the end of the sixteenth century, writes David N. Durant, an ostentatious but simple-minded German Duke began pestering Queen Elizabeth to grant him the noblest of all English Orders.

Christopher Hibbert describes how the massacre at Cawnpore was one of the events in the Indian Mutiny not expected by benevolent British Commanders.

‘Unwearied in the office of friendship’, all his life Crabb Robinson was devoted to men of genius and faithfully recorded their behaviour, as Joanna Richardson here discusses.

Politically, Mayor Adenauer admitted, the British occupation was always scrupulously fair. By D.G. Williamson.

Clarendon’s great ‘History’ was composed largely in exile and published after his death. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses how the historian had originally intended this great work to be private political advice to the King.

William Gardener describes how Russia's stealthy advance across Siberia led to close relations with China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The term ‘Chimurenga’ has various historical associations. It was originally used to describe the first rising against British rule of the 1890s; the Rhodesian Bush War of the 1970s is known as the Second Chimurenga. J.V. Woolford, writing as the Bush War was ongoing, puts the term in context.

Dianne Ebertt Beeaff explains the disappearance from view of Anglo-Saxon family names from modern English life.