History Today

Dogged by rumours of stolen thrones and treachery, the Capetians were nonetheless one of the most successful dynasties of the medieval West.

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce is a tender study of European rural life. But is this lost past closer than we think?

In the era of the early modern ‘secret state’, two notorious brothers set up an elaborate intelligence network, managing a vast array of spies and informers watchful for Jacobite plots against Britain.

Just two countries supported the Republic during the Spanish Civil War: the Soviet Union and Mexico. While Soviet help came with strings attached, Mexico’s reflected the country’s contentious relationship with its old colonial master.

The 18th century was the age of graffiti, when the writing on the wall turned political.

Reforms to divorce law inevitably prompt moral panic as they did in Victorian England. It has not yet proven to be justified.

Two very different volumes, Sparta and the Commemoration of War and The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae, grapple with the myth of Sparta.

‘Genocide’, the Holocaust episode of The World at War, was pioneering when it first aired. Does it stand the test of time? 

To support ex-servicemen injured during the First World War, charities like St Dunstan’s found creative ways of fundraising.