History Today

After a disastrous Second World War, Japan abolished its armed forces and embraced pacifism. With renewed tensions in East Asia, can it last?

In the medieval period you could touch the divine – and smell it, see it, hear it and taste it, sometimes all at once.

The medieval world was incredibly learned, but how did its great bank of knowledge spread – from Classical Greece to the libraries of the East and from there to the bookshelves of England?

Teenagers were agents of change in 1960s Britain, but the birth of youth movements such as the Mods was heavily indebted to the multicultural society from which they grew.

Was the massacre of April 1919 a symptom of British oppression, or an exceptional event?

William (‘Willie’) Lamont (1934-2018) changed our understanding of religion and the civil war.

Without political power of her own in ancient Rome, Fulvia wielded that of her husbands. 

De Gaulle’s secret was an ability to project a sense of French gloire, even when it didn’t really exist.

‘What’s the most important lesson history has taught me? That the same arguments come around again and again.’