History Today

Martin Pugh reconsiders the motives and impact of the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison.

Lord Byron’s death there in April 1824 created an enduring legend. But the real story of the poet’s mission to help Greece in its revolution against Ottoman Turkish rule is one of hard-headed politics, which goes straight to the heart of the country’s present-day crisis, says Roderick Beaton.

Harriet Tuckey’s relationship with her father was a difficult one. Only at the end of his life did she realise the importance of the contribution he had made to the most celebrated of all mountaineering expeditions.   

Roger Howell discovers that the Spaniards who conquered the Americas had little real understanding of the civilizations that they overthrew.

Imbued, with the militant spirit of the Counter Reformation, a sixteenth-century Prince Bishop, Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, set out to re-build Salzburg as a Second Rome, as Tudor Edwards here describes.

F.E. Halliday finds that every age, from the first Elizabethan to the present one, has evolved its own methods of producing Shakespeare; sometimes with results that might have surprised the dramatist.

Most of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in or around the City of London. By the time he retired, Greater London – a residential as well as a commercial metropolis – was beginning to spring up beyond its ancient limits.

Shakespeare was born into an England rejoicing in the peace and prospects of a new reign, but anxious about the future, writes Joel Hurstfield.

Long a diplomatic agent for Louis XV, D’Eon spent the last thirty-three years of an ambiguous life in woman's dress. Edna Nixon investigates this bizarre case of early modern espionage.

A solid middle-class clan who exported English wool to foreign markets, the Celys have left behind them a graphic record of their private affairs and shrewd commercial dealings, as Alison Hanham here finds.