Historiography

The importance to historians and anthropologists of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, ten years after its first publication. 

The ‘Milan Kundera affair’, in which the eponymous Czech novelist was recently accused of denouncing a ‘spy’ to the security services in 1950, illustrates how the Communist past has become a battlefield for Czech historians of different generations, writes Aviezer Tucker. 

Giles MacDonogh visits the History Today archive to examine Nancy Mitford’s 1968 article on one of the ‘oddest’ biographies ever written, Thomas Carlyle’s massive study of Frederick the Great.

Juliet Gardiner explains why her new book examines a short period of the 20th century and how she attempts to achieve a panorama of experiential history that gives readers a real feel for a slice of time.

By taking a rational, global overview of the past, historians can better understand the challenges facing humanity, says Paul Dukes.

An overview of the historiography on the decline of Spain in the seventeenth century.

Paul Cartledge visits the archive of History Today to retrieve a critical appraisal of the Greek proto-historian Herodotus by the inimitable Oxford don Russell Meiggs, first published in 1957.

Jeremy Black examines A.J.P. Taylor’s account of the Crimean War, published in February 1951.

Juliet Gardiner analyses the recent explosion in interest in historical novels

Catherine Merridale examines competing versions of Russia's troubled past in the light of present politics.