History Today

Winning the vote for women brought new energy to campaigns for social and political equality. Joanne Smith looks at the remarkable flowering of women’s associations in Britain during the 20th century.

The Battle of Culloden, which vanquished for good Jacobite claims to the British throne, is a much mythologised and misunderstood event. Murray Pittock cuts through the fog of war to find out what really happened in April 1746.   

The ideas of a French philosopher provided the great Egyptian novelist with a way of assessing the good and the bad in his nation’s past.

History on television is long overdue a radical rethink.

Kate Wiles on a ‘map to the stars’, designed to promote a Los Angeles neighbourhood to Hollywood’s new celebrities.

The beginning of another year provides Eleanor Parker with an opportunity to reflect on a meditation on time that combines exquisite Old English poetry with early medieval science.  

Violence and expansion were integral to the armed bureaucracy at the heart of the East India Company.

The choice of the dollar as the international reserve currency was controversial but practical.

The fates of powerful women in modern Uzbek politics echo the events of 1,000 years ago. 

Divisive political debate is nothing new. In the popular new alehouses of the 17th century, it could end in fisticuffs – even death.