History Today

There is nothing new or exceptional about the recent English riots and they will have little long-term impact, argues Tim Stanley.

William Beckford was the model of an 18th-century progressive and aesthete. But the wealth that allowed him to live such a lifestyle came from the slaves he exploited in his Caribbean holdings. Robert J. Gemmett looks at how an apparently civilised man sought to justify his hypocrisy.

Rachel Hammersley discusses how events in the 1640s and 1680s in England established a tradition that inspired French thinkers on the path to revolution a century later.

The 264 inhabitants of the island of Tristan da Cunha were evacuated to Cape Town on October 10th, 1961.

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility was first published in London by Thomas Egerton on October 30th, 1811.

One of the architects of the British Empire resigned on 5 October 1761.

Although little known, the disastrous East India Company intervention in Java had a significant influence on India's governance and left Stamford Raffles’ reputation in tatters.

Having fled Hitler’s Berlin, Oscar Westreich gained a new identity in Palestine. He eventually joined the British army, whose training of Jewish soldiers proved crucial to the formation of Israel, as his daughter, Mira Bar-Hillel, explains.

The idea that the German foreign office during the Nazi period was a stronghold of traditional, aristocratic values is no longer tenable according to recent research, as Markus Bauer reports.

Richard Lansdown introduces Hugh Welch Diamond, one of the fathers of medical photography, whose images of the insane both reflected and challenged prevailing ideas about visually recording insanity.