History Today

Odo Russell, writes Alec Randall, was Britain’s unofficial diplomatic agent at the Vatican during the years when Italy was unified and when the controversy took place over the Papal Syllabus.

For thirteen years, writes Alec Randall, Odo Russell was British Ambassador in Berlin where he was an appreciative critic of Bismarck’s policies.

On June 9th, 1774, a fête champêtre, magnificent even by eighteenth-century standards, attracted an appreciative concourse of the English nobility and gentry. Olive Fitzsimmons describes the event.

Frances Austin reads the lively late eighteenth century letters of a great surgeon’s apprentice to his family in Cornwall.

Fourteen years older than his half-brother, Lawrence Washington was an active Virginian landowner. J.I. Cooper describes his life, career, and interest in US expansion westwards.

An island in a sea of mountains, as Sarah Searight describes it, the Indian region of Ladakh was once a cosmopolitan centre of pilgrimage and trade.

From Norman times until the fifteenth century, writes L.W. Cowie, the Tower was often a royal residence as well as a fortress and armoury.

Anthony Dent describes how this rich French province remained a royal English vineyard for a good three centuries.

John Wesley spent two years as a chaplain in Georgia in the 1730s; Stuart Andrews describes how forty years later he was much preoccupied with the War of Independence.

Margaret Martyn profiles a seventeenth century missionary in Bengal and Madras who privately traded with ‘interlopers’.