History Today

The recent killing of a French teenager by fascist sympathisers recalls the tensions and divisions of the 1930s, says Chris Millington.

Adrian Mourby welcomes the return to public view of the Habsburgs’ esoterica.

It is time to ditch the Blackadder view of history, says Gary Sheffield. Britain was right to fight Imperial Germany in 1914.

Richard Kennett calls on his fellow history teachers to embrace narrative. There is no better way to inspire the historians of the future.

The author of Whisky Galore played an active role in the Great War, experiencing both the horror of the Dardanelles in 1915 and the intrigues of wartime Athens. Yet his diplomatic ham-fistedness forced his premature exit. Richard Hughes explains. 

The persecution and execution of Jews in 15th-century Italy highlights the ambiguous attitudes of Renaissance intellectuals towards Jewish people, their beliefs and their historical relationship with Christian theology, as Stephen Bowd explains.

Church and State stood foursquare behind the superiority of man in seventeenth century England. It was only when a lady became a widow, writes Maurice Ashley, that a glorious opportunity for authority and freedom suddenly flooded in upon her.

In Rome, after the fall of the Republic, women played a conspicuous, independent and sometimes ill-omened part. But it was on their follies and extravagances, rather than on their virtues, that masculine writers usually preferred to dwell, writes J.P.V.D. Balsdon.

Lord Kinross describes how, during the first half of the eighteenth century, gin-drinking became a serious social evil.

After centuries of masculine predominance, as the Republic neared its end, a host of notable women crossed the stage of Roman history—the devoted Porcia, the beautiful Julia, the Amazonian Fulvia, described here by J.P.V.D. Balsdon as “a Lady Macbeth of the Roman world”.