History Today

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.

Of the British officers who fell at Waterloo, writes Antony Brett-James, none was more distinguished than General Sir Thomas Picton.

The legend that Babeuf had created and the doctrines of Babouvism became a powerful force in nineteenth-century Europe. W.J. Fishman writes how, among those whom it inspired, were the authors of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Thin, pale, solitary, a day-dreamer, opinionated, rebellious, with sudden bursts of energy that quickly evaporated, D.C. Watt writes that Hitler as a boy is a strange forerunner of the would-be world-conqueror.

“Treat the Pope as though he had an army of 200,000 men"—Napoleon. By E.E.Y. Hales.