History Today

Arnold Whitridge introduces two powerful newspaper editors, who greatly exacerbated public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic during the American Civil War.

In the days of European Imperialism, writes Alastair Hirst, a notable Scotsman played a large part in the history of Morocco.

Unlike everybody else in his generation, writes Arnold Whitridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson understood, loved and castigated the two different, but closely related, strains in American life and represented the national conscience.

The exile of the Loyalists, writes Wallace Brown, represented the removal of the crust of increasing aristocratic pretensions that was forming on Colonial society.

On April 19th, 1775, the fatal clash took place, on the Common of a small Massachusetts town, between British troops and local militia. From this village battle the American War of Independence took its start. John A. Barton queries whether the clash was deliberately organized by “Patriot” leaders in order to provoke an incident, after which there could be no retreat?

Esmond Wright assesses the gap between the Washington of popular imagination, and established historical fact.

Both Lafayette’s career and the legend bound up with it have had important effects on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.

“What is the American, this new man?,” Franklin seemed to provide the answer to this question first asked in 1784.

Gifted, energetic, passionate, unruly, Hamilton was perhaps the most creative figure thrown up by the American Revolution, argues Esmond Wright.

Even by the standards of the eighteenth century — a period when it was still possible to be the master of more arts than one — Richard Price was conspicuous for the vast variety of his interests. Nicholas Lane describes how they embraced divinity, philosophy, mathematics, life assurance, the problems of population, the cause of the American Colonists and the revolutionary movement in France.