Volume 61 Issue 12 December 2011

Anne Ammundsen laments the lack of public access to a revelatory account of a young English officer who crossed swords – and words – with George Washington.

A former editor of History Today reflects on the advertisements that helped to fund the first 20 years of this magazine’s publication and explores the wider messages they reveal about sexism, empire and swinging Britain during the 1950s and 1960s.

Greg Carleton explains how disastrous defeats for the Soviet Union and the US in 1941 were transformed into positive national narratives by the two emerging superpowers.

At the Coronation Durbar of 1911 George V announced that the capital of British India was to be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. But the move to the new model city was a troubled one, as Rosie Llewellyn-Jones explains.

Alfred Nobel’s Peace Prize has become something other than its founder intended, claims Fredrik S. Heffermehl.

It is the responsibility of parents and politicians to define and pass on a nation's values and identity, argues Tim Stanley. Historians and teachers of history should be left alone to get on with their work.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been a marked increase in accounts of the past made by those considered to have been on the ‘losing side’ of history. But, warns Jeremy Black, we should all be wary of the forces such histories can unleash.