History Today

The ill-fated fortress was opened on February 14th 1938.

The wedding of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V took place on February 14th 1613.

The celebrated little person was married on February 10th, 1863.

Joseph Merrick inherits another kind of pachyderm trait in this cartoon from Rob Murray.

At Deptford, on April 4th, 1581, Francis Drake, who, during the previous autumn, had returned from his triumphant circumnavigation of the globe, knelt before Queen Elizabeth and received a knighthood

Charles I had ‘the authority to plan and initiate a policy, but he had not the power to enforce it.’

Nearly 35 centuries ago the first Empress in the history of the world proclaimed herself Pharaoh; Jon Manchip White records how Queen Hatshepsut then went on to rule for more than 20 years.

The diffusion of wild flowers, thousands of miles from their native places, is a “vegetable record” Geoffrey Grigson suggests, of human migration and colonization.

N.P. Macdonald explains how modern Brazil owes its extensive frontiers, and the discovery of many of its natural riches, to the journeys far inland, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of pioneers in search of slaves.

No monument of Christian architecture is more celebrated than the Cathedral of Chartres. Peter Quennell here traces both the origins of the great church and the effect it has exercised on succeeding generations.