History Today

J.P. Kenyon profiles William III, of whom Hallam said: “It must ever be an honour to the English Crown that it has been worn by so great a man.”

Proud, turbulent, fiercely Catholic, the citizens of sixteenth-century Paris played an important part in French history. Here N.M. Sutherland depicts them at home against the background of their daily work and pleasures.

George Woodcock relates the story of French Canada, from Cartier's first voyage, to the death of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham.

D.M. Nicol assesses Justinian's valiant attempt to restore the splendours of Imperial Rome, by turning back the clock to the days of Augustus, and making the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake, concluding it “was impractical and largely a failure. But it was a glorious failure."

S.G.F. Brandon poses the question: was Josephus, the famous Jewish historian of the first century A.D., an arch Quisling of the ancient world? He “could scarcely have given a worse impression of himself than that to be derived from the Jewish War,” whence he emerges as an unscrupulous opportunist whose conduct is rendered even more distasteful by a hypocritical profession of the highest motives.

T.H. McGuffe describes how the mounted lancer and the pike-bearing infantryman have appeared on European battlefields from classical times until within living memory.

J.H. Burns writes that few men have had a more decisive influence on the history of Scotland than John Knox. At what point in his career did he make up his mind to use his religious authority for political purposes, in order to bring down the “idolatrous sovereignties” that he saw around him? And why did he thus, almost unwittingly, become a revolutionary?

Edmund Baker describes how Cromwell's principal assistant in foreign affairs and his most devoted friend, Thurloe, saw in the Protectoral system “a mean between two intolerable extremes of unrestrained anarchy and reaction.”

From 1565 until the year of Waterloo, great Spanish galleons continued to cross the Pacific, bearing cargoes of American silver. ‘This prodigious voyage’ took a heavy toll of life. Yet still (wrote a Chronicler) ‘the desire of gain prevails...’

J.R. Pole describes how the idea of equality, when applied to the new multi-racial, multi-lingual, multireligious America of vast industry and teeming cities, was destined to conflict with some of the deepest existing preconceptions about the fundamental character of American society.