History Today

Adrian Mourby welcomes a new wave of opera houses around the world, and compares this with the previous surge in the late 19th century.

Martin D. Brown tells the little-known story of how British and American soldiers disappeared in Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains during the remarkable episode of Slovakia’s National Uprising against its Nazi-supporting government during the Second World War.

Already dictator of France, a coronation took place on 2 December, 1804.

Leslie Ray argues that politics and football have always been inseparable in the land of the ‘hand of God’.

Nicholas Vincent celebrates the founder of the Plantagenet dynasty.

William Frend, later professor of ecclesiastical history at Glasgow University, explained how he influenced the course of European history in 1944.

Edmund Fryde takes a look at a major English medieval rebellion with far-reaching consequences.

Juliet Gardiner looks at what it meant to refuse to fight or lend support to the war effort in the Second World War, the different reasons people asserted this right, and how their actions were interpreted in wartime Britain.

Have politicians always been seen as liars? Mark Knights finds political spin at work in the early party politics of Queen Anne’s England.

Andrew Cook describes how a chance encounter with Houdini had a profound impact on the methods of Britain’s leading First World War spymaster.