History Today

A mizusashi jar created during the Azuchi-Momoyama period in the Saga Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan, 16-17th century.

Chadō

The ‘way of tea’ is a ritual experience that embodies the natural world with all its imperfections.

Victory at Narva, by Gustaf Cederström, 1905. Nationalmuseum. Public Domain.

Charles XIII: The Madman of the North?

Charles XII of Sweden had a thirst for war, which made him a target for the British press.

Harold Wilson, photographed in his study at home in Westminster, in 1986. Allan Warren/Wiki Commons.

Main Man

The ‘pragmatic and principled’ Harold Wilson.

Decline and Fall

Vladimir Putin has decried the ‘decadent West’ as destined to fail as a result of its degeneracy. Fears of decadence are not new.

Yanktonai, Nakota, Sioux buckskin shirt for a chief’s war dress, collected at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, 19th century. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum/Creative Commons.

Powerful Inversion

Understanding the Indigenous American past, from the earliest records of settlement up to the Ghost Dance revitalisation movement.

Trofim Lysenko measuring the growth of wheat on one of the kolkhoz fields near Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, c.1930s.

Genes‘R’Us: Science and Ideology in the Lysenko Controversies

The debate over whether nature or nurture guides who we are is as dependent on politics and ideology as it is on scientific research.

Heirs and Spares

It was not easy to be the second son. The younger brothers of the French kings could choose either to rebel or reconcile, but neither option was straightforward.

Jane Austen and the King of Skiffle

A folk favourite loved by Jane Austen and Abraham Lincoln, ‘The Irishman’ has revolutionary roots that have been forgotten.

Some of the participants of the Cairo Conference, photographed in March 1921. Wiki Commons.

Hotel Days

Diplomatic negotiations at the 1921 Cairo Conference carved out a new geostrategic order.

opium farmers in a poppy field in Yunnan, China, c.1900.

Opium for the Masses

In Republican China, amid the chaos of dynastic collapse and war, opium became a rare stable currency, yielding huge riches for those who knew how to work the system.