History Today

G.R. Dunstan discovers the moral status of the human embryo throughout history and how judgments have been linked to the scientific understanding of the time.

Dymphna Byrne looks forward to the 400th anniversary of the Spanish Armada

Proud patriots perhaps, but were the irregular forces in Spain's war against Napoleon a help or a hindrance? Charles Esdaile investigates.

Tim Tatton-Brown reviews the picture of one of Anglo-Saxon England's best-known saints built up at a major exhibition in Canterbury for the millennium of his death.

Georgy Smirnov investigates the reforming policies in the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Tony Aldous comments on a scheduled ancient monument on the Settle-Carlisle Line.

The chance discovery of a 14th-century parchment charting the financial habits of Richard II

Was eighteenth-century England dynamic, entrepreneurial and secular, or hierarchic, conservative and confessional? Jeremy Black investigates recent 'revisionist' reassessments of the period.

Roy Porter describes an institution of the mid-18th century designed to care for abandoned infants.