History Today

The problems of the interwar mining industry, which led to a General Strike in 1926, writes W.H. Chaloner, epitomized the struggle between capital and labour in twentieth-century Britain.

In a continent dedicated to republicanism, writes George Woodcock, the Braganza dynasty for eighty years guided the destinies of Brazil.

In 1902, writes Norman Wilkinson, a revolutionary dictator named Castro provoked an Anglo-German naval demonstration off the coast of Venezuela.

Crevecoeur fought under Montcalm at Quebec in 1759 and, writes Stuart Andrews, afterwards settled in New York and Pennsylvania.

Robert Blake traces the career of Edward Geoffrey Stanley, a low-profile leader who nevertheless became British Prime Minister three times: firstly in 1852; then from 1858-59; and lastly from 1866-68.

Leonard W. Cowie traces six centuries in the history of a former London barrier.

Harold Kurtz writes that the torments of a false conscience formed a secret experience that was with Talleyrand all his life.

What he had always wanted to be, Talleyrand wrote in later life, was “the man of France”—not the representative of a party, a political system or a sovereign master. Does this ambition, asks Harold Kurtz, explain his various changes of allegiance, including his “betrayal” of Napoleon, for which many French historians cannot forgive him?

On November 17th, 1874, when Henry Morton Stanley marched away from Bagamoyo on what was to be his greatest exploring achievement, he was retracing his own steps of 1871 along the well-worn caravan route used by Burton and Speke in 1857; by Speke and Grant in 1860, and, writes C.E. Hamshere, many Arab traders before them.

A gifted utilitarian, and sometime Member of Parliament, Douglas Hurd writes that John Bowring spent ten tumultuous years in China where he believed in supporting the cause of progress with British gunboats.