History Today

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.

Gabriel Ronay remembers the dramatic days of October 1956 when, as a student in Budapest, he was at the heart of the protests against the Soviet occupation.

As part of the ongoing debate over Black History Month, Tristram Hunt asks for greater dialogue between politicians and academics concerning the place of history in modern Britain.

The US Supreme Court looks likely to overturn the Federal law on abortion. Nicholas Hill and Peter Ling look at the political background to the legal argument.

William Kuhn considers some of the ways a look at Benjamin Disraeli’s sexuality challenges our idea of the Victorians and the man himself.

Matthew Greenhall looks at the place of Scots in the economic and social life of Newcastle and the surrounding areas in the late Stuart and early Hanoverian years.

In the Iraq war a radical Muslim group claimed that they prefer to attack black American soldiers, because ‘To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation. Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes’*. As Dick van Galen Last shows here, such prejudices were also common in the 20th century when an occupation by black soldiers was considered an exceptional humiliation: in the years after the Great War the German people called it the Black Shame.

Deborah Hayter argues why family and local history archives should be prevented from being sold abroad and, whenever possible, remain accessible in the region where they were created.

Hugh Purcell finds stirring memories of the British Raj in this thriving city, a far cry from its dreadful reputation of a generation ago.