History Today

Portugal's colonial empire was, at the C.R. Boxer wrote this article in 1956, the oldest in the world, with Mozambique as its most prosperous possession.

Hereward Senior traces the British employment of foreign professional soldiery, from Danish axemen before the Norman Conquest, to Sepoys in the days of the British East India Company.

The Field Marshal who had led his country to independence in 1918, writes Oliver Warner, was called upon twice to defend his own creation during the Second World War.

When the celebrated antiquarian nicknamed “Stumpity Stump” toured the rustic neighbourhoods that then surrounded London, writes Meyrick H. Carré, the metropolis was on the verge of a period of ruthless expansion and development.

Jamaica, writes Morris Cargill, has been a British possession since the times of Cromwell.

The Civil War coincided with an era in naval technology that was revolutionizing sea warfare.” Could the Confederate government build a fleet of “ironclad blockade breakers” in the shipyards of neutral Great Britain? By Frank J. Merli and Thomas W. Green.

The Grace Darling legend as an early manifestation of the terrifying power of sustained publicity; Richard Armstrong writes that she may well have been its first victim.

The prototype of nationalist hero, yet a great internationalist, Garibaldi believed passionately in freedom but did not, writes Denis Mack Smith, disdain dictatorial methods.

From 1868 until 1916, writes Roy Jenkins, in the days of high Imperialism, the Liberal Party held office at Westminster for no less than twenty-five years.

W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chalonert describe how it was from incomplete evidence, and in a spirit of political prejudice, that Engels compiled his famous account of the condition of the British working-classes.