History Today

S. Pollard discusses one of history's most controversial financial reformers.

Four hundred years ago the Duke of Northumberland made his vain attempt to exclude Mary and Elizabeth Tudor from the succession in favour of Jane Grey. S.T. Bindoff reconstructs the circumstances and development of this daring and ingenious plot and produces a new document, throwing light on it, which he recently discovered in the Archives at Brussels.

The problem of writing local history, R.H. Hilton suggests, can seldom be solved on the basis of parishes or even of counties; regions with a distinctive character and economy, such as the Cotswolds, are the natural units for the local historian’s attention.

Sir Lewis Namier shows how, through the growth of mining and the coal-trade, the social and economic character of North-Eastern England was entirely transformed.

At the dawn of the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte liquidated the French empire in America, selling the vast Bourbon heritage along the banks of the Mississippi to the United States. Why?

C.H. Brown presents his study of the political and economic background to mid-twentieth century Egyptian nationalism.

Revolutionary impulses do not always originate in proletarian discontent. Hugh Trevor-Roper's article traces 17th-century radicalism to a very different social source.

In these extracts Arthur Bryant describes the glorious reign of King Alfred, 871-99

Stephen Coleman traces the history of smoking, from its American beginnings to the twentieth century mass market.

Up to the reign of James II, the College of Heralds, besides the part they played on state occasions, had the important duty of regulating the kingdom’s social structure, as Anthony R. Wagner here documents.