History Today

Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network and David Reynolds’ Mirrors of Greatness seek to bring Churchill’s contemporaries and adversaries out of his shadow.

What are stars made of? When a young astronomer upset standard explanations for the formation of the solar system, the establishment told her she was wrong – then stole her findings.

Despite their reputation, London’s private members’ clubs have never been entirely for men.

An old-fashioned feature of a fusty, inegalitarian past, when did the British stop knowing their place?

Solomon Shereshevsky died on 1 May 1958. He dreamt of being a hero but achieved greatness of another kind.

The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby surfaces Umayyad and Abbasid perspectives on their Frankish frenemies.

A Nottinghamshire election in 1593 descended into farce, violence and, ultimately, futility.

The nabobs of the East India Company were considered violent, greedy and – worst of all in a time of Enlightenment – uneducated. Could their reputation as philistines be laundered?

So called because it passed without a shot being fired, the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 brought Portugal’s authoritarian Estado Novo to an end. Could the state have survived?

The kapo trials of the early 1960s confronted a difficult question: how should Israel judge Jews accused of complicity in the Holocaust?