History Today

Who Won the Thirty Years War?

Peter H. Wilson unravels one of the most notoriously bloody and complex conflicts in European history to answer the question.

John Wilkes’ Way

Secrecy shrouded the ways of politicians until the 18th century. Then John Wilkes came along, writes David Horspool.

Our Oldest Bible: The Codex Sinaiticus

Christians have long relied on scribes’ copies of Biblical texts; J. K. Elliot describes how the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered in 1844, dates from the fourth century.

Signposts: The Victorians

In the second of our occasional series exploring the ways in which topical historical subjects are being tackled in a variety of media, Rohan McWilliam examines a time in Britain’s history that seems to repay frequent revisiting more than a century after it ended.

Stranglehold on Victorian Society

‘Garotting’, or the strangulation of a victim in the course of a robbery, haunted the British public in the 1850s. Emelyne Godfrey describes the measures taken to prevent it and the range of gruesome self-defence devices that were often of greater danger to the wearer than to the assailant.