This Month's Magazine
In the February issue:
- Africa’s global powerbrokers
- Policing postwar Vienna
- Victorian ‘freak shows’
- Portugal’s soft fascism
- Homosexuality in India
- Russian propaganda
- The history of goulash
You can buy this issue from our website or at newsagents across the United Kingdom from 24 January. You can also subscribe or read it as a digital edition via the History Today App.
There's also a Spotify playlist to accompany the issue, featuring songs inspired by the magazine's contents:
Selected articles from this issue
Four historians consider how their discipline can best reach a mass audience.
India’s decision to decriminalise homosexuality is presented as the country shaking off the last vestiges of colonialism. The reality is not so simple.
Though long established as the national dish of Hungary, its origins lie with the rootless, itinerant stockmen who roamed the plains of medieval Mitteleuropa.
At the centre of a war-shattered Europe, Vienna was divided between the victorious Allied powers. Restoring civil society proved a major challenge.
In Victorian Britain, attitudes towards race, gender, disability and Empire were all to be found in the popular ‘freak shows’.
From the pit to Pythagoras, the self-made man rose to the top of the mathematical world and divided it in two.
The Thai-Burma railway was built by prisoners of war in appalling conditions. The dead were treated with a dignity denied the living.
Africa has been global for millennia, but its history is too often eclipsed by narratives that focus on slavery and its abolition.
A dog sled relay came to the rescue of an epidemic-struck Alaskan community on 2 February 1925.
Short, angry missives pinged across the world – Russian propagandists used postcards to get their message across.
Good intentions, misinformation and fear contributed to haemophiliacs becoming the hidden victims of HIV in Ireland.
The buildings that came out of Portugal’s New State were described as an ‘architectural lie’.
The question of the responsibility of the ‘everyman’ and ‘everywoman’ remains a pressing one.
Four centuries of horticultural endeavours in the modest plots of the ‘lower orders’.
We like historical films to be factually accurate, but we also like them to reflect our sensibilities.