History Today

Edward Acton outlines the historiography of the Russian Revolution.

Catherine the Great wrote of Sophia Alekseevna, the first woman to effectively rule Russia, '... we cannot but own, that she was very capable of governing.'An article by Lindsey A.J. Hughes

What were the origins of Charles Darwin's particular species of genius?

Dracula, the vampire that haunts our dreams, is the one created by the 19th-century author, Bram Stoker: but, as Paul Dukes explains here, there is a basis in fact and eastern European legend for the ghoul.

'Thrice had his foot Domingo's island prest, Midst horrid wars and fierce barbarian wiles; Thrice had his blood repelled the yellow pest That stalks, gigantic, through the Western Isles!' ran the epitaph to one of the more than 20,000 British soldiers sent to St. Domingue in the 1790s.

The art of India is a vital cultural expression of India. As Partha Mitter explains, it is intertwined with assertions of nationalism, the equation of modernisation and westernisation, and a desire to preserve the cultural heritage of India.

The British had been trading in India since 1600. As R.W. Lightbown, it was not, however, until the late eighteenth century that British interest in Indian culture burgeoned and was carried home by the traveller.

If the British Empire were to be saved, it would take a renewal of Britain’s youth. Robert Baden-Powell had the answer: self-reliance, patriotism and the Boy Scouts.

Keith Robbins poses the question of religious and political affinities of Roman Catholics in the context of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

The visit of Pope John Paul II to England, Scotland and Wales, has brought to the fore interest in the complex relations which have existed between the Papacy and religion and politics in post-Reformation Britain. In the first of these articles, Eamon Duffy traces the path of the dilemmas and allegiances of English Catholics since the Reformation.