History Today

In the mid-fifteenth century, writes Anthony Bryer, George Kastriota, surnamed Skanderbeg, was acclaimed as a powerful champion of Christianity on the eastern shores of the Adriatic.

After a reign of forty-eight years, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, left behind him in 1688 a military and bureaucratic system that endured until 1945. F.L. Carsten describes how it was the army he had founded that accomplished, in 1871, the triumphant unification of the German Empire and fought the battles of the Third Reich.

Martin Braun offers his study of the Italian Liberators' roles on the centenary of the beginning of their work.

From 1858 to 1870, a privileged and gifted English observer, Odo Russell, watched the declining fortunes of the Papal government. Russell reported in his strong and lucid style, writes Noel Blakiston, “as though they formed a chapter of medieval history.”

W. Baring Pemberton introduces the most intrepid of the Italian Liberator's English volunteers.

Charles Chevenix Trench describes how a political crisis of the first magnitude arose when George III succumbed to a psychotic disorder that baffled his physicians.

Dorothy Margaret Stuart describes how the earliest English printed book was issued from William Caxton’s press at Westminster in 1477, under the patronage of the ruling House of York.

The traditional version of the scramble for empire in Africa during the late nineteenth century is here challenged and critically re-appraised by Eric Stokes.

One of the longest and happiest, though least fortunate, of British royal marriages was solemnized in 1761. It had been preceded by a lengthy search which, writes Romney Sedgwick, the King himself inspired and conducted, through all the eligible princesses of Europe.