History Today

Little remains of the great North African empire that was Rome's most formidable enemy, because, as Richard Miles explains, only its complete annihilation could satisfy its younger rival.

The American soldiers who fought their way through the islands of the Pacific during the Second World War encountered fierce Japanese resistance but few local people. That all changed with the invasion of the Mariana Islands, says Matthew Hughes.

The English journalist Walter Bagehot was one of the few commentators to grapple with the constitutional issues behind the the American Civil War. Frank Prochaska discusses his ideas.

R.C. Richardson describes the fortunes of young women driven by poverty into domestic service in early modern England. A number fell victim to predatory masters and ended up with illegitimate children, only to be ejected form households into penury or, worse, executed for infanticide.

Sexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains. 

At the beginning of the ninth century, Charlemagne—already the master of Western Europe—was crowned by a calculating Pope as the supreme sovereign of the Christian world. Peter Munz asks what the real significance of his new title really was?

Richard Cavendish remembers the birth of Mrs Gaskell in Chelsea in 1810.

Richard Cavendish remembers the first performance of Porgy and Bess on September 30th, 1935.

Richard Cavendish remembers the Union of South Africa's first election campaign in September 1910.

Hywel Williams revisits an article by Peter Munz, first published in History Today in 1959, and asks who needed whose approval most, the great ruler of the Franks or Pope Leo III?