Historiography

Global history has become a vigorous field in recent years, examining all parts of the empires of Europe and Asia and moving beyond the confines of ‘top-down’ diplomatic history, as Peter Mandler explains.

The return of religion and the West’s current obsession with decline make Roy Porter’s profile of Edward Gibbon, first published in History Today in 1986, curiously dated.

Historian Michael Burleigh has won the prestigious Nonino International Master of his Time Prize.

Simon Heffer argues that until relatively recently most historians have been biased in their efforts to harness the past to contemporary concerns.

Michael Bentley looks at the father of British historiography who was an eloquent and controversial opponent of teleology.

Christopher B. Krebs considers Irene Coltman Brown’s article on the ambivalent and ironic Roman historian Tacitus, first published in History Today in 1981.

George Macaulay Trevelyan, one of the last Whig historians, died on 21st July 1962.

Roger Moorhouse revisits a perceptive article by John Erickson on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, first published in History Today in 2001, its insights born of a brief period of Russian openness.

Chris Wickham revisits an article by J.B.Morrall, first published in History Today in 1959, on the strange, shortlived emperor who in the tenth century sought to rule the lands we now call Germany and Italy.

Some historians romanticise the powerless to the point where they can do no wrong. This offers a moral threat to both the profession and the wider society, which must be challenged, says Tim Stanley.