History Today

The history of our times has witnessed violence on an unimaginable scale. George Kassimeris reflects on the age-old horrors of warfare and struggles to find reasons for what leads men to perpetrate inexplicable acts of brutality.

Peter Barber, Head of Map Collections at the British Library, finds his way round ‘London: A Life in Maps’ a new exhibition opening at the British Library on November 24th.

Jonathan Phillips sees one of the most notorious events in European history as a typical ‘clash of cultures’.

Charles Stephenson introduces a plan for chemical warfare in the Napoleonic navy, devised by Thomas Cochrane, Lord Dundonald, the model for Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey.

The furniture maker died on October 22nd, 1806.

The father of today’s frozen food business died on 7 October, 1956.

Sylvia Pankhurst was taken to the women's jail at Holloway on October 24th, 1906.

Cartoon historian Mark Bryant looks at the career of Victor Weisz (Vicky), for whom the Hungarian Uprising and its repression by Soviet tanks proved a political turning-point and the catalyst for some of his most powerful cartoons.

John D. Niles reports on the search for the real ­location of the Heorot, the hall where Beowulf feasted before fighting the monster Grendel.

Michael Simmons has been back to Budapest as it prepares to commemorate the anniversary of the 1956 Uprising, and finds many questions still unanswered.