History Today

Nothing captures the past like a drop of perfume, says Roja Dove, connoisseur and curator of a recent survey of the history of perfume, as he sniffs out the fragrances that characterised their age.

Richard Cavendish remembers the birth of the pianist who was also briefly prime minister of Poland, on 18 November 1860.

Richard Cavendish remembers the attempted coup against the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1960.

Richard Cavendish remembers the execution of a notorious murderer on November 23rd, 1910.

When Penguin Books was acquitted of obscenity for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a door was kicked open to the social revolution of the 1960s. Geoffrey Robertson discusses the impact of the trial, a defining moment in modern legal history.

The gulf between the religious ideals of US conservatives and those of the European Enlightenment is as wide as the Atlantic. Tim Stanley looks at the origins and the enduring legacy of the American revivalist tradition.

The intriguing death of an Indian holy man in 1985 suggested that he was none other than Subhas Chandra Bose, the revolutionary and nationalist who, it is officially claimed, died in an air crash in 1945. The truth, however, is harder to find, as Hugh Purcell discovers.

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 to promote scientific research. Through a process of trial and error, this completely new kind of institution slowly discovered how its ambitions might be achieved – often in ways unforeseen by its founders, writes Michael Hunter.

Amanda Vickery’s new series on the 18th-century home is part of an enlightened new strategy from the BBC, writes Paul Lay.

A century after the execution of Dr Crippen for the murder of his wife, Fraser Joyce argues that, in cases hingeing on identification, histories of forensic medicine need to consider the roles played by the public as well as by experts.