History Today

For most of Britain’s population, the Restoration had little effect. Life under Charles II was much the same as it was under Cromwell, argues Derek Wilson.

Switzerland’s recent vote to ban the building of minarets drew widespread criticism. A look at the historical background to that decision, the result of a typically Swiss mixture of conservatism and democracy.

The decision by Sussex University to drop research-led teaching and implement a post-1900 curriculum will produce scholars lacking in historical perspective, says Martin Evans.

Devastating earthquakes have been chronicled on the island of Hispaniola for the past 500 years, writes Jean-François Mouhot.

In the mid-18th century – at the height of the power struggle between France and England and the political ferment of both nations – a French spy with a peculiar personal agenda came to prominence in London. Jonathan Conlin tells his story.

A mysterious child from northern Germany, portrayed by William Kent on the King’s Grand Staircase, became one of the sensations of the Georgian age, as Roger Moorhouse explains.

The Wars of the Roses were no clear-cut dynastic conflict, but rather a series of struggles between the magnates of the age and the retinues they maintained by Alan Rogers. Anthony Pollard offered his own separate historiographical analysis in 2010.

Anthony Pollard visits the History Today archive to examine Alan Rogers’ claim that a lack of principle among rival lords resulted in the great conflagration of 15th-century England.

When Napoleon surrendered to a British naval captain after his defeat at Waterloo, the victors faced a judicial headache. Was St Helena Britain’s Guantanamo Bay?

In May 1940, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. But the great war leader’s rise to power was far from inevitable. Taylor Downing explains what a difference a day made.