History Today

It is the issue of Russian identity, rather than strategic or economic importance, that lies at the heart of the Crimean crisis, argues Alexander Lee

George Woodcock describes the thrice nominated Democratic candidate for the Presidency, William Jennings Bryan, who eloquently expressed the feelings of the Western farmers at a time when the United States were first becoming a great international Power.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, writes D. Pepys Whiteley, an easy-going Royal Duke was deeply embarrassed by the scandalous revelations of a discarded mistress, and by the publication of his private letters.

During his many years of administration, writes H.T. Dickinson, Walpole was highly unpopular with large sections of the community.

A man of obsessions, a passionate racialist with a romantic belief in the virtues of the ‘sturdy peasant farmer’, Quisling ruled war-time Norway as a devoted pupil of the Nazi government.

W.J. Reader describes a scandalous episode that arose out of the transfer of authority in India from the East India Company to the Crown.

Geoffrey Warner describes a politically polarising event which would later influence the formation of French fascism and the Vichy state.

“We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order” announced Lenin to the Congress of Soviets early on the morning of November 8th, 1917. He had prepared no blueprint from which to work, and forty years later, writes Ernest Bock, the structure of the Soviet state is very different from that which its founder envisaged.

Christopher Sykes describes how the last Tsar of Russia, as well as Adolf Hitler and other anti-Semites, were among those taken in by this spurious publication.

‘Man has made himself what he is today.’ Joe Rogaly writes how important biological changes have recently transformed his whole existence.