History Today

Television's Luddites

Taylor Downing, producer of a dramatised documentary about the Luddite disturbances in Regency England, talks about the making of the current-affairs-style programme, and the 'then and now' parallels about resistance of skilled workers to the introduction of new technology.

Reassessing Peterloo

Peaceful protest or planned provocation? Philip Lawson re-examines 19th-century England's most famous law-and-order massacre with the aid of a key eyewitness account.

Did the Portuguese Discover Australia?

Two hundred years before Captain Cook, Dieppe map makers placed the Portuguese flag on a large land-mass called Java-la-Grande approximately where Australia appears on today's atlas. Helen Wallis sifts through the cartographic evidence to examine the intriguing question.

Celtic Chain Reactions

Keith Nurse describes the warlike aristocracy uncovered by an archaeological finding in Yorkshire.