History Today

Christopher Lloyd marks the tercentenary of Robert Black, Cromwell’s “General at Sea,” whose name ranks with those of Drake and Nelson in English naval annals.

On March 9th, 1762, in Toulouse, a Huguenot merchant was broken on the wheel for a crime that he had not committed. “It is because I am a man,” declared Voltaire, that he undertook the defence of the unhappy Calas family. His efforts, writes Edna Nixon, produced a drastic reform of the French judicial system.

Today a ‘beautiful but broken shell’, the Parthenon has housed three very different cults – those of Athena, Allah and the Blessed Virgin – since it was first constructed in the fifth century BC. It was a Christian soldier, in the siege of 1687, who did most to destroy the sanctuary. 

Artist and Industrialist have rarely succeeded in establishing a fruitful alliance. But during the latter years of the eighteenth century, writes Neil McKendrick, such an alliance was formed—with results that we admire today. Wedgwood, a great potter, and Stubbs, a celebrated painter, agreed to pool their very different gifts.

Meyrick H. Carré introduces an Irishman who personified the genius of experimental inquiry and did much to influence the Enlightenment in England.

Owing to the researches of the late Michael Ventris, Greek scripts of some six or seven centuries before the Age of Homer can be read. Here, L.R. Palmer here examines the basis of Ventris's achievement in classical scholarship.

On May 10th, 1857, while the bells of Meerut rang for divine service, the Sepoys of the Bengal Army rose in revolt against the rule of the British East India Company. That mutiny, Jon Manchip White writes, affords brilliant glimpses of a wilful generation.

Cecil secured the peaceful accession of the Stuarts and strove with near success, Joel Hurstfield writes, to solve the vexatious problems that confronted the new dynasty in England and upon the European scene.

As Professor of Arabic at Oxford, writes P.M. Holt, Pococke pursued his scholarly life amid civil war and republican experiment.

During the Seven Years' War with France and Spain, writes A.P. Thornton, a British expedition from India captured and held the Philippine capital.