History Today

In the light of current events in North Africa and the Middle East, David Motadel examines the increasing frequency of popular rebellions around the world.

James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s future biographer, found Glasgow a dull place. Yet it was at the city’s university that he came into contact with the political economist Adam Smith, whose insights forced the student to grapple with competing claims on his conscience, as Robert Zaretsky explains.

Jacqueline Riding examines how a 19th-century painting, created almost 150 years after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, has come to dominate the iconography of that event.

Michael Bloch tells the story of one of the more unusual dynasties related to the Windsors.

The quest for spiritual virtue through personal austerity drove many Eastern Christians to lead solitary lives as hermits surviving in the wilderness. Andrew Jotischky describes how indifference to food became an integral part of the monastic ideal in the Byzantine era, one revived in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Modern day obituaries often speak of illnesses ‘bravely fought’, but the history of pain, a defining and constant experience in lives throughout history, lacks a substantial literature, argues Joanna Bourke.

Since its discovery in Yemen in 1972 a collection of brittle documents, believed to be among the earliest Koranic texts, has been the subject of fierce and divisive debate among scholars of Islamic history, as Scott MacMillan reports.

The capture of the Holy City by the forces of the First Crusade was a victory against the odds, but its legacy has borne bitter fruit.

Roger Moorhouse revisits a perceptive article by John Erickson on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, first published in History Today in 2001, its insights born of a brief period of Russian openness.