History Today

Wild Bill Hicock and wagon trains - familiar images of pioneer spirit, but a more complex and less triumphalist view of how the American frontier moved West is explained by Margaret Walsh.

Richard Ollard looks at the rise and fall of Sherborne Castle.

Barbara Schreier offers a fascinating insight into how the dress, customs and attitudes of Jewish women escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe altered as part of their assimilation as Americans.

John North examines how genuine democracy was in Republican Rome, and the perils and pleasures of being a citizen and/or running for office.

Valery Rees surveys the life of the ruler who put 15th-century Hungary on the map, both culturally and geographically, but whose efforts may have put an intolerable strain on the body politic.

Susan Cole looks at how, though formally excluded from the political process, Athena's sisters nevertheless made their mark.

Paul Hennessy talks of his two unsound heroes in history in the inaugural lecture of the Longman-History Today awards

Angela Morgan considers the effects of recent upheavals at the Science Museum.

Heroes or villains? Stewart Russell looks at the Indian after-life of American Civil War generals.