History Today

Sentiment, profit and commercial laissez-faire bound the merchants of England's busiest port ever closer to the rebel confederacy across the Atlantic after 1861. John D. Pelzer explains how and why.

When money for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists began to dry up in the late 1930s, he turned to novel schemes for fund-raising. James and Patience Barnes recount the intriguing story.

Juan Cole looks at the pacifist, prophetic and millenarian 'world religion' whose leader emerged from the social and political unrest of 19th-century Iran and whose followers have since been persecuted by shah and ayatollah alike.

Paul Cartledge on democracy - from ancient Greece to modern Eastern Europe.

Andrew Fettegree looks at how the life and death of a radical religious maverick points up the tensions between individualism and order in Reformation Europe.

John Springhall on violence in the 19th-century media

Ann Hills on attempts to recreate authentic historic houses and grounds

'What's the matter with kids today?' Beth Bailey looks at the teen dreams of America's golden post-war years and finds ambivalence about their attitudes to affluence, competition and 'going steady'.

Michael Burleigh describes how the traditional debate over euthanasia was given a perverted twist by the Nazi use of it for a campaign of mass extermination, and the films and actors they used to enlist support for it.

Political cartoonists are the sharpshooters of the artistic world; theirs is a skilled but risky profession. Peter Mellini draws a line on the marksman James 'Gabriel' Friell, whose career at the Daily Worker and Evening Standard spanned the crucial years of Depression, World War, Cold War and post-war recovery.