History Today

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.

Sedition could cost you your life in Tudor England, but by the 18th century the monarch was fair game, writes David Cressy.

Opera has flourished in the United States. But how did this supposedly ‘elite’ art form become so deep-rooted in a nation devoted to popular culture and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal? Daniel Snowman explains.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, France was riven by political division as extremes of left and right vied for power. Annette Finley-Croswhite and Gayle K. Brunelle tell the tragic and mysterious story of Laetitia Toureaux, a young woman swept up in the violent passions of the time.

A distant monarch, political factionalism, vainglorious commanders and the distraction of European enemies helped George Washington seal victory in the American War of Independence, writes Kenneth Baker, who explores the conflict through caricature and print.