History Today

As Matthew Shaw demonstrates, scandal sold newspapers 200 years ago, just as it does today.

Lauren Kassell reveals how the casebooks, diaries and diagrams of the late-16th-century astrologer Simon Forman provide a unique perspective on a period when the study of the stars began to embrace modern science.

Christopher B. Krebs considers Irene Coltman Brown’s article on the ambivalent and ironic Roman historian Tacitus, first published in History Today in 1981.

Rupert Murdoch’s motives only make sense from a historical perspective, argues Piers Brendon.

Since the 1970s, feminists, gay activists and historians have been questioning the notion of sexual repression in the past. Anna Clark considers important recent studies on this most stimulating of subjects.

Patricia Cleveland-Peck looks at the long history of plant dispersal between the New World and the Old.

In 15 years Æthelstan united the English for the first time. Yet many of the facts about the Anglo-Saxon king remain elusive.

In the late 1890s Herbert Hoover, the future President of the United States, and his wife became embroiled in the violent uprising that broke out in China.

The discovery of a letter written by the great physician sheds new light on one of the most dramatic events in Roman history, as Raoul McLaughlin explains.

The American Civil War was not a simple struggle between slaveholders and abolitionists, argues Tim Stanley.