History Today

Peter Linebaugh finds inspiration in the worldwide and timeless assertion of common rights, expressed in Magna Carta.

Mark Bryant examines how cartoonists saw the most traumatic years of American history.

James Barker reveals how parsimony and muddle in Whitehall in the first years of the British Mandate in Palestine almost led to disaster in August 1929.

Edward Said’s controversial book is now thirty years old. A new exhibition of Orientalist paintings at Tate Britain provides a timely opportunity to revisit its argument, says Kamran Rastegar.

Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke look at the ways ordinary people responded to  religious changes within their places of worship from the Reformation to the Restoration.

Nick Baron reads the memoirs of an independently-minded Ulsterman involved in the British intervention in North Russia, 1918-19.

As Scotland celebrates five hundred years of printing, Martin Moonie’s investigations into the earliest printed books in Scots leads him on a trail to Paris.

Stephen Brumwell examines how the death of a charismatic young British officer 250 years ago this month – and the involvement of his two younger brothers in subsequent military operations in North America – had a lasting impact on Anglo-American history.

The Territorial Army, currently celebrating its centenary, has had a constant struggle to survive – and never more so than today, says Ian Beckett.

Anthony Aveni explains how the people planning great monuments and cities, many millennia and thousands of miles apart, so often sought the same inspiration – alignments with the heavens.