History Today

Bernard Pool describes how Pepys regarded the Naval shipbuilding programme of 1677 as his greatest administrative achievement.

If the world were ruled by a single Christian monarch, peace and justice would prevail: such was Dante’s vision in the early fourteenth century, writes Robert F. Murphy.

Roderick Cavaliero introduces Admiral Pierre Andre de Suffren, an eighteenth century legend of the French navy.

Iris Macfarlane assesses how Christian missions from Goa operated at the Mughal Emperor’s court.

At Ephesus during the fifth century B.C., writes Colin Davies, the philosophy of Heracleitus combined elements from Eastern visionaries and from Greek rationalism.

Leonard W. Cowie traces the development of a peculilarly English legal institution, from the pre-Reformation era, into Dickensian times.

John F. Bailey describes how all early navigators, until the mid-eighteenth century, were baffled by the problem of longitude in finding their ships’ position.

Michael Paffard opens for the visitor Thomas Tusser’s books on husbandry, which expounded the practical virtues of ‘thrift’ to Tudor farmers.

For Serbs the 1389 Battle of Kosovo was a physical defeat against the Ottoman Turks, but a moral victory that formed the backbone of Serbian national identity.

Four years after William I's conquest of England, writes J.J.N. McGurk, a Lincolnshire thegn named Hereward led a fierce resistance movement against Norman rule.