History Today

Josiah Wedgwood and George Stubbs

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.

Robert Boyle and English Thought

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

The Script of Mycenaean Greece and its Decipherment

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.

The Indian Mutiny, Part I

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.

The British in Manila, 1762-1764

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

The Peace of Arras: 1435

Dorothy Margaret Stuart gives the political background of the career of Joan of Arc, when France was enfeebled by foreign invasion and civil strife, and the Duchy of Burgundy had almost achieved the status of an independent European power.