History Today

A.J.P. Taylor on one of those surprising outsiders with a touch of mischief – in this case a man whose political career spanned nearly sixty years.

John A. Kirk recalls the dramatic events at Little Rock, Arkansas, when a stand-off over the granting of black students access to integrated education brought the civil rights agenda to international attention.

Ian Friel argues that popular ideas of the nature of Elizabethan seapower are distorted by concentration on big names and major events. Elizabethan England’s emergence on to the world stage owed much more to merchant ships and common seamen than we might think.

Mark Bryant admires a Russian artist whose lampoons of Napoleon inspired some notable British caricaturists.

Jonathan Clark, editor of a major new history of the British Isles, considers what effect the intellectual currents of our own time have had on the way historians write.

The astrononer made a remarkable discovery on January 7th, 1610.

Paul Cartledge visits the archive of History Today to retrieve a critical appraisal of the Greek proto-historian Herodotus by the inimitable Oxford don Russell Meiggs, first published in 1957.

Bernard Porter reviews the field of studies of British covert operations and espionage.

John Tosh argues that historians should find ways to teach undergraduates the practical applications of their uniquely insightful discipline.

Medieval scholars were the first to make the connection between maths and science and anticipated the discovery of inertia long before Newton. So why have their discoveries been forgotten, asks James Hannam.