History Today

The Abbey of Saint-Denis: A Royal Mausoleum

Established, by Louis IX at the burying-place of the French monarchy, in 1793 Saint-Denis was solemnly desecrated by order of the revolutionary Convention, determined to remove all “horrid memories” of the former royal line. By Peter Quennell.

Church and State in Russia

J.H. Shennan offers a study of the relationship between Russian Orthodoxy and the secular power in the time of the Tsars.

When Canada Did Not Choose Freedom

Robert Cecil describes how, despite the blandishments of commissions from Philadelphia, and the exercise of force by the Continental Congress, Canada chose to remain separate in the 1770s.

Basel and the Renaissance

G.R. Potter describe show, during the 15th and 16th centuries the scholarship of the humanists and theologians was fused at Basel into something characteristically Swiss.

The Battle of Toro 1476

Townsend Miller describes the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon, issued in Spain’s greatest century and accomplished amid civil war and in spite of foreign intervention.

The Exclusion Crisis, Part I

J.P. Kenyon describes how the childlessness of the Queen, and the conversion of James, Duke of York, to Roman Catholicism, produced a febrile state of opinion in Restoration London, out of which rumours of a “Popish Plot” naturally arose.

The Small Gardens of Pompeii

Wilhelmina F. Jashemski visists the heart of the Pompeian house: the garden. While some gardens were splendid and spacious, others were crammed into minute courtyards “no larger than a professor's desk,” but rich with flowers and enclosed by painted walls.

The Search for the Seven Cities

One of the strangest episodes in the Spanish conquest of the New World was the quest for the mythical Seven Cities, first believed to stand on a mysterious island far out in the Atlantic Ocean, afterwards magically transported to the depths of America.