History Today

Milton Goldin explores Himmler’s ambitions to establish the SS as a ‘state within a state’, and highlights schemes the Nazis devised to finance the organisation through industrial enterprise and plundered Jewish assets.

In the aftermath of 1798 the British had to deal with thousands of political prisoners. Michael Durey traces the mixture of decisiveness, pragmatism and clemency with which they were treated.

Ian Scott traces the hundred-year history of heroin, from cough medicine to underworld narcotic. 

Giacomo Casanova died on June 4th, 1798. His autobiography guaranteed him an enduring reputation as a womaniser; but there was more to him than that.

As Britain prepares to receive the Emperor Akihito on his first state visit, we look at two aspects of the relationship between Japan’s past and its present. In this first article, John Breen examines the Japanese paradox of a constitutional monarch.

John Breuilly looks at the attempt to create a German nation-state and how it foundered on the questions of national minorities, border disputes, shared sovereignty in a federal state and the intersection of power politics with idealism.

Ian Fitzgerald looks forward to the restoration of Augustus' tomb in Rome.

Extracts from the remarkable diary of an English-born bank clerk, stranded in the Afrikaner stronghold of the Orange Free State during the Boer War. Edited by Franzjohan Pretorius and Iain R. Smith.

Having made many powerful enemies, the Dominican friar and puritan fanatic Girolamo Savonarola was executed on 23 May 1498.