History Today

Thomas J. Brady offers a study of a fashionable photographer who became the great visual recorder of the American Civil War.

Arnold Whitridge introduces a musician, a financier, and a playwright who was also a secret agent; Beaumarchais believed in the success of American arms, and organized a flow of supplies and munitions from France to the hard-pressed colonists.

Astonished by the hustle of American life, and awed by the immensity of the country, Richard L. Rapson describes how visitors from Britain returned home both chastened and invigorated.

The third President of the United States had been the first American Minister in Paris; Stuart Andrews describes how, to the end of his life, he was a faithful disciple of the French Enlightenment.

Born in the West Indies; Secretary of State in the Confederate Government, Benjamin ended his career as a successful barrister in London. By Charles Curran.

In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from Tsar Alexander II at a price of just two cents an acre. What brought Russia’s American empire to such an ignominious end?

Throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, writes Robert G. Weisbord, the idea of a return to Africa stirred the imagination of Negro leaders in the United States.

In 1513 the Spaniards reached Florida; Louis C. Kleber describes how fifty years later the French followed them.

George Woodcock describes how, during the century that followed the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in Britain, servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company explored the Canadian west and the Arctic regions.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as Tocqueville perceptively remarked, Russia and the United States had grown to nationhood almost unnoticed. ‘The world learned of their existence and their greatness at almost the same time’. By Paul Dukes.