History Today

‘Human society must be begun again’, wrote Chamfort, who, after delighting the Court and the fashionable world, became an eloquent prophet of the Revolution. By Alaric Jacob.

By the 1840s, writes Gerald S. Graham, there flourished a fast regular steamship between Britain and India, with fierce competition between Calcutta and Bombay.

“There is no analogy,” wrote Bury, “between the development of a society and the life of an individual man.” Martin Braun describes how Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin and others have sought to controvert him by arguing the case for the “Senescence of the West.”

By victory in the war of 1870, writes Harold Kurtz, Bismarck secured German unity at the expense of France.

Harold Kurtz offers the background to the Franco-Prussian War.

Fourteen years before the French Revolution, writes Felice Harcourt, the son of a Belgian nobleman joined the court of the Bourbons.

Widowed for the fourth time, ‘Bess of Hardwick’ came to London for the last time; D.N. Durant writes how this visit shows the Countess of Shrewsbury to have been intent upon legal business over her estates.

A study of the cosmographical theories and nautical observations that prompted Columbus’s momentous voyage to the unknown West in 1492.

Michael Glover investigates the early modern sources of the English reputation as the most indefatigable writers of letters in the world.

David Mitchell describes the postwar peace-making efforts employed by Woodrow Wilson in 1919.