History Today

War is prominent among the forms of human experience that have most readily stimulated poetry. In combat both mind and body strain at the end of their tether.

Peter Burke considers the various works dealing with the Renaissance

What made for a good king in the Middle Ages? John Gillingham argues the case for Richard the Lionheart

The British Empire was the largest in the history of the world. Brian Lapping explains how the end of that Empire was charted for television.

At the Boston Tea Party the Americans not only flouted the unpopular tax laws on tea imposed on the colony, they also retrieved the image of the Mohawk from the hands of British cartoonists and reinstated him as the symbol of American liberty.

A.J.G.Cummings explores Scotland's links with Europe from 1600-1800.

Six leading historians of science define their discipline.

Low birth rates have obsessed the French since their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, argues Richard Tomlinson.

To historians he seemed to be a philosopher, to philosophers an historian. But in spite of the difficulty of categorising the late Michel Foucault (1926-84), or perhaps because of that very difficulty, he has had a considerable impact on historical writing and deserves to have more.

In 1972 Albert Paul, a retired Brighton carpenter, produced a charming account of his childhood years for a local history society entitled Poverty, hardship but happiness; those were the days, 1903-17.