History Today

Cry Hungary!

Cartoon historian Mark Bryant looks at the career of Victor Weisz (Vicky), for whom the Hungarian Uprising and its repression by Soviet tanks proved a political turning-point and the catalyst for some of his most powerful cartoons.

Beowulf’s Great Hall

John D. Niles reports on the search for the real ­location of the Heorot, the hall where Beowulf feasted before fighting the monster Grendel.

Whose History is it Anyway?

As part of the ongoing debate over Black History Month, Tristram Hunt asks for greater dialogue between politicians and academics concerning the place of history in modern Britain.

Abortion: Brewing Up a Storm

The US Supreme Court looks likely to overturn the Federal law on abortion. Nicholas Hill and Peter Ling look at the political background to the legal argument.

Disraeli, Dandyism and Decadence

William Kuhn considers some of the ways a look at Benjamin Disraeli’s sexuality challenges our idea of the Victorians and the man himself.

‘Black Shame’

In the Iraq war a radical Muslim group claimed that they prefer to attack black American soldiers, because ‘To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation. Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes’*. As Dick van Galen Last shows here, such prejudices were also common in the 20th century when an occupation by black soldiers was considered an exceptional humiliation: in the years after the Great War the German people called it the Black Shame.