History Today

17th-century manicule and notes in the margin of translations of Aristotle. Courtesy of the Penn Library.

Filling the Gaps

Notes in the margins of early modern books can be very revealing about their readers’ lives and interests.

Sri Lanka’s Deep Wounds

Sri Lanka’s historic ethnic divisions were forged during British colonisation and a bloody civil war. Could the current crisis help unify a divided country?

The Face of Beatrice Cenci

The painting that inspired Shelley and Stendahl is thought to be of a young woman executed on 11 September 1599 for the murder of her father.

Oil painting of a man smoking an opium pipe, Europe

Has a War on Drugs Ever Been Won?

Society’s battle against what Richard Nixon called ‘public enemy number one’ is an ancient one. Is there any sense in fighting?

Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, by Benjamin West, c.1816.

Knobs or Points?

Is lightning natural or divine? Opinion split royalists and republicans.

A fragment of text inscribed on the Mesha Stele, c.840 BC. Louvre/Wiki Commons.

Inventing the Alphabet by Johanna Drucker review

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker explores the birth of the alphabet before the Greeks.

On the Spot: Hakim Adi

‘It is not the rich and seemingly powerful that make history, but the majority of humans.’

Agere Ifá, early 20th century. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College.

Ifá Divination

Patterns in dust reveal the right verses to live by.

King Lear, Act I, Scene I by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1898. Metropolitan Museum of Arts. Public Domain.

King Lear’s Great Stage of Fools

Is King Lear the Shakespearean tragedy for a world of capitalism and catastrophe?

Poster showing the ‘Birth of the Soviets and the Different Organs of Soviet Power’, c. 1920.

Survival of the Least Fit

Is there a trend of ‘reverse Darwinism’ in Russian history?