History Today

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’.

The East India Company, writes R. Cecil, had at first shown a ‘modest interest’ in the civilization of their native subjects; but Evangelical pressure groups recommended a very different attitude.

Versatile artist and vagrant man of the world, Johan Zoffany has left us a vivid and exquisitely detailed record of the late eighteenth-century social scene from Scotland to the Indian subcontinent. By Aram Bakshian Jr.

R.B. Fountain introduces an influential French artist of wild animals and the chase.

Uniquely of engineers, the reputation of Brunel lives on, commemorated by a university, dockyards, steamships, and countless other works of his discipline. But what, asks Walter Minchinton, were his achievements?