History Today

Adrian Mourby reveals the thinking behind the new Turks exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Rhoads Murphey reflects on a thousand years of Turkic cultural development.

Judy Urquhart recalls a forgotten use of Colditz Castle after the end of the Second World War – as a prison for German aristocrats.

Julie Rugg reports on recent research done into official attitudes towards burial during the Blitz.

Tamerlane, or Timur, one of history's most brutal butchers, died on 18 February 1405.

Bernhard Rieger considers how luxury liners became icons of modernity and national pride in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Phil Reed, Director of the new Churchill Museum, gives a personal insight into the development of the new museum housed in the Cabinet War Rooms, which opens to the public this month.

Yehuda Koren tells one family’s remarkable story of surviving Auschwitz.

On January 27th, 1945, the Red Army liberated what was left of the Auschwitz extermination camp. Taylor Downing reveals extraordinary aerial photographs of the camp taken during the summer of 1944, which pose awkward questions about why the Allies did not act to stop the killing.

Simon Chaplin describes the extraordinary personal museum of the 18th-century anatomist and gentleman-dissector John Hunter, and suggests that this, and others like it, played a critical role in establishing an acceptable view of dissection.