History Today

Besides the Royal Academy, write Sonia & Vivian Lipman, the Somerset House building housed the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries.

The first Doukhobors reached Canada in 1898 and their leader followed in 1902. George Woodcock describes how fanatical sects later arose in their New World settlements.

Across the Pacific, writes C.M. Yonge, from northern Japan to the Californian coastline, the relentless hunt for the sea-otter’s precious fur had international consequences.

Andrew Jackson was the first President to be a ‘Westerner’ and, writes Larry Gragg, his inauguration in Washington ‘belonged to the people’.

Born in Brunswick, Louis Weltje became cook to the Prince of Wales in the 1780s and landlord of his Marine Pavilion at Brighton. L.W. Cowie describes his life and times.

Joyce Ellis describes how, among the mine-owners of Tyneside, there was bitter animosity of which the successful William Cotesworth was nearly a victim.

For centuries before independence in 1877 the Romanian principalities led a precarious life of their own, writes Kenneth Johnstone.

Since its foundation, writes Ian Bradley, the Old Vic theatre became in turn a drinking den, a temperance hall, and the home of serious ballet and drama.

A Genoese family ruled the Mediterranean principality for several centuries; Len Ortzen describes how, in 1715, the heiress married a Norman.

During the mid-nineteenth century, writes Stuart D. Goulding, Judge James McDonald, a Westchester attorney with a keen interest in the past, collected from a large number of elderly survivors their personal recollections of the American Revolutionary War as it had affected ordinary men and women.