History Today

'A kind of apotheosis of terracotta', the Natural History Museum has been open for a hundred years as a scientific institution to serve the huge lay audience who are knowledgeable about nature and eager to learn more. Robert Thorne reflects on how, in its centenary year, the museum's architectural perfection is under threat.

'Australia is a nation of immigrants' In the belief that manifestations of the unconscious can no longer be exempt from the attentions of the historian, John Rickard argues that psychohistory can illuminate this vital theme of Australian history.

Mysterious, exotic, colourful.... this was the view of their colonies that the 1900 Paris Fair presented to the French. William Schneider argues that this image was to persist and hamper an understanding of colonial development.

Alfred Stepan argues that the romantic acclaim of Fidel Castro as a revolutionary guerrilla leader disregards the practical achievements and structural changes he has brought to Cuba and distorts his world-view of revolution.

During the 18th and 19th centuries the rights of villagers to take dead wood for fuel came under attack in England as local landowners used new statute laws to redefine such activities as criminal. At Great Wishford in Wiltshire, a successful defence of custom was made, which continues to be reaffirmed each year on 29 May.

Chris Wrigley reviews the impact of the great historian, celebrating his recent birthday.

Kenneth Hudson on how the museum at Rüsselsheim is no usual museum of local history or industry. Rather it is a museum of industrialisation conceived as a microcosm of German life to show the effects which industry has had on the lives of local people.

James A. Arvites argues that the defeat of the Roman army at Adrianople in AD 378 changed the face of the Empire and led to the replacement of the infantry by heavy cavalry as the mainstay of its forces.

Ian Beckett continues our series on military history with a look at War and Society.