History Today

For 13 days in October 1962 the world watched Cuba with bated breath. What was the view like from the epicentre of the missile crisis?

Lions are noble; unicorns pure. Knowing how to decipher heraldry reveals the aspirations – and humour – of the regal past.

John Payne Collier died on 17 September 1883, after a lifetime of creating deliberate fictions, falsehoods and forgeries.

Notes in the margins of early modern books can be very revealing about their readers’ lives and interests. 

Sri Lanka’s historic ethnic divisions were forged during British colonisation and a bloody civil war. Could the current crisis help unify a divided country? 

The painting that inspired Shelley and Stendahl is thought to be of a young woman executed on 11 September 1599 for the murder of her father.

Society’s battle against what Richard Nixon called ‘public enemy number one’ is an ancient one. Is there any sense in fighting?

Is lightning natural or divine? Opinion split royalists and republicans. 

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker explores the birth of the alphabet before the Greeks.

‘It is not the rich and seemingly powerful that make history, but the majority of humans.’