Cold War

Paul Lay pays tribute to the playwright, dissident and former Czech president, who has died aged 75.

Wracked by industrial decline, Britain and France embraced the world’s first supersonic airliner: Concorde.

Andrew Boxer demonstrates the ways in which external events affected the struggles of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

Caught between the end of empire and the birth of NATO, Britain's postwar Labour government played a key role in the early stages of the Cold War.

Martin Evans introduces a short series looking at changing attitudes to history in the former Communist states.

Alex von Tunzelmann reassesses a two-part article on the troubled relationship between the United States and Cuba, published in History Today 50 years ago in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Perhaps the US-backed invasion of Fidel Castro's Cuba was inevitable, but its failure bucked the trend.

Rowena Hammal explains why the Korean War broke out in 1950.

Almost everything written about and by Kim Philby is wrong, claims Boris Volodarsky. The Soviet spy and his KGB masters sought to exaggerate his successes against the West, beginning with the fictions that surround Philby’s first mission during the Spanish Civil War.

Shortly before his death, Hyman Frankel, the last surviving member of the team whose work led to the development of the atom bomb, talked to Maureen Paton about why he decided not to join the Manhattan Project.