History Today

Emma Griffin charts the postwar emergence of working-class history as a scholarly discipline and argues that, thanks to the torch-bearers, the rationale for it has ebbed away.

Second-hand books don’t just tell the stories of their authors but of their former owners, too.

Daniel Beer reassesses W. Bruce Lincoln’s 1976 study of Tsar Alexander III’s brief reign, which combined reaction with rapid industrialisation and left a troubling legacy for his successors.

The Ancient Greek gymnasion was a place to perfect the body for future festivals rather than somewhere to assuage the guilt of excess.

The appalling treatment of women and girls by the soldiers of Islamic State and other jihadist groups raises troubling questions about the historical relationship between military conflict and sexual violence.

Once among the least monitored nations in the world, Britain is now probably the most watched. Why do Britons make so little fuss about this erosion of their ancient liberties, asks Bernard Porter?

The leader of the British Union of Fascists, attempted to portray himself as a reluctant antisemite, a narrative many historians have bought into. But such a reading is wrong. Opposition to Jews was at the very core of the would-be dictator’s ideology.

This is an extract from Anna Field’s ‘Masculinity and Myth’, which won the 2014 History Today undergraduate dissertation prize, awarded in conjunction with the Royal Historical Society.

The warrior and tutor-in-arms to the son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine promised his dying charge that he would complete the sacred task of crusading to the Levant. Did he succeed in his mission and fight the forces of Saladin?

Westerners often consider Russia through the prism of the Soviet Union and the Second World War. But we must look further back if we wish to understand the modern nation’s fears, aims and motivations.