History Today

In 1907, writes A.W. Palmer, two empires that had three times been on the verge of war in the preceding thirty years reached a hopeful accommodation.

Born on the banks of the Rhone, this enlightened French missionary was the first European to carry out a comprehensive survey of the manners and customs of the Hindus. Roderick Cameron describes how the book that he wrote, which he published with the encouragement of the British East India Company, remains a classic in its own field.

In September 1939, writes J.V. Woolford, a British war in Europe seemed alien to many Dutch South Africans, but General Smuts changed the country’s mind.

“The son of a cotton millionaire scouring the auction rooms of Europe and building lavishly in the latest architectural style,” the Tory leader was a highly representative early nineteenth-century figure. By J. Mordaunt Crook.

A prosperous member of the commercial middle class, writes Roger Fulford, Whitbread made his name as the champion of radicalism and the persistent advocate of unpopular causes.

Though the Decembrist rising against the Tsar was quickly put down, writes Michael Whittock, the officers and land-owners who led it created an heroic revolutionary tradition that influenced Russians of every class.

W.J. Fishman writes that Rocker devoted nearly twenty years of his life to organising and inspiring the immigrant Jewish tailors in the East End of London.

No other leader of the French Revolution held the centre of the revolutionary stage so long as Robespierre. George Rudé portrays him as its personification and guiding spirit — a man of lofty aspirations, though according to the popular legend a fanatical man of blood.

Of all the measures undertaken by President Peron, none was more popular in Argentina than the nationalization of the British-owned railway system.

A series of cases over a period of sixty years had raised the question of whether juries could pronounce on the substance of charges of libel and sedition or merely on the facts of publication. H.M. Lubasz writes how Fox’s Libel Act of 1791 put an end to doubt and thereby admitted the public to a larger vote in political affairs.