Volume 55 Issue 8 August 2005

Max Adams investigates the truth behind the introduction of a key invention of the early Industrial Revolution.

Archaeologist Chris Scarre finds fascination in discovering the past by examining its material remains.

Looking back on the sixtieth anniversary of the surrender of Japan, Rana Mitter finds the political background to the demonstrations in China against Japanese history textbooks are full of complexities.

As thousands of pupils prepare for their exam results, Richard Willis describes the origins of school examinations in England.

Julius Caesar first landed in Britain on August 26th, 55 BC, but it was almost another hundred years before the Romans actually conquered Britain in AD 43.

Jonathan Hughes discovers the humanity of Thomas Charnock, a forgotten Elizabethan alchemist in search of the philosopher’s stone.

John MacKenzie suggests that imperial rule and the possession of empire were an essential component of British identity, life and culture for over 200 years from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

The Magyars of Hungary were defeated by an army led by Otto I, on August 10th, 955.

A late-Roman coin unearthed in an Oxfordshire field and on show in the Ashmolean Museum leads Llewelyn Morgan to ponder the misleading messages on the faces of coins.

Paul Doolan visits a new museum in Geneva that presents the history of Reformed Christianity and Calvinism as a key and positive factor in European history.