History Today

A family planning clinic opened in New York on 16 October 1916. It lasted only a few days.

Witnessing the slow decline of his native Sicily, the last Prince of Lampedusa saw both blame and possible salvation in the island’s unique location and history, writes Alexander Lee.

How the collapse of the world he knew and loved in 1914 later made the promising young scholar and diplomat into one of the most extraordinary and controversial historians of our time.

One of the grandest, certainly one of the largest, manuscripts produced in the medieval West, the Codex Amiatinus is often overlooked as an Anglo-Saxon treasure. Conor O’Brien shows how its makers used it to assert their identity and to establish their place firmly within the Christian world.

Evidence from Britain’s First World War conscription tribunals reveals a surprisingly efficient and impartial system, as Rebecca Pyne-Edwards Banks asserts in this extract from her 2015 undergraduate dissertation prize-winning essay.   

Since it was founded in 1948, the issue of how Britons have laughed with – or at – the NHS reveals much about changes in society.

Unpicking a tangle of history, myth and misunderstanding reveals why, for so long, we believed King Harold was shot through the eye at the Battle of Hastings.

It is 300 years since the death of a remarkable Scottish noblewoman.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, a tiny collection of islets and shoals has been the focus of disputes involving seven nations.