History Today

For the Portuguese empire to rise, an old world had to give way. Rivals in Europe’s lucrative spice trade, how much did they know about the powerful Mamluk sultanate?

The vagaries of palace politics are notoriously difficult to record. Historians should pay attention to rumour.

British soldiers fighting in the American Revolutionary War were unprepared for the terrain awaiting them across the Atlantic. Many thought that America was determined to destroy them; some felt it had succeeded.

Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918-1941 is a tale of three cities linked by globalisation and a singular global citizen.

The first year of Edward I’s reign saw waves of strictures placed on a Jewish community in an already perilous situation. It set the path to their expulsion.

How many planets are there? As with the discovery of Uranus, the answer depends on who you ask.

On 16 January 1926, the BBC broke the news that a murderous mob was storming the capital. Broadcasting the Barricades wasn’t supposed to be a hoax, but it was an effective one.

What makes someone a king? More importantly, what unmakes a king? Henry II’s experiment in co-kingship saw one Henry III fall and another rise.

Naples 1343: The Unexpected Origins of the Mafia – Amedeo Feniello’s history of the Camorra – has this much in common with the case against them: it’s all about the evidence.

There was no law permitting cremation, but there was no law against it either. On 13 January 1884, a Welsh druid took the matter to trial.