History Today

Woman with a rifle near a canon. Spanish civil war. Barcelona, 1936.

In the Thick of It

Eyewitness reports of European wars and the febrile mood of nations as they tipped into conflict.

A clove tree, from Jacob van Maerlant’s Der naturen bloeme (The Flower of Nature), Flemish, early 14th century. British Library/Add MS 11390, f.79v.

Crossing Oceans

Cloves, grown in Indonesia, crossed the globe in the Middle Ages, showing how interconnected the medieval world was.

Robert Ritter, head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police, conducting an interview with a Romani woman, 1936.

The Roma Holocaust

Europe’s Roma were the victims of Nazi genocide during the Second World War, but their persecution did not end in 1945. 

Life in the Countryside, by Jan Brueghel the Elder, 17th century.

The Continuity of Community

The support and camaraderie of close-knit communities were a double-edged sword. Nothing was private and reputations could be ruined at the twitch of the curtain.

Ducks and Flowering Water Plants by a Pond, pith paper painting by Sunqua, c.1820.

In Pursuit of Pith

Flowers formed from pith paper captured the imagination of British society in the 19th century, sparking a search for the elusive ‘rice paper’ plant.

London

London Burning

A fresh account of how Londoners responded to the impact of the Second World War. 

The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, by Édouard Manet, 1868.

The Death of an Emperor

With the US riven by civil war, Napoleon III seized the opportunity to install an emperor in Mexico. Maximilian’s new regime soon fell apart in a catastrophic manner.

The ‘Course Boys’ outside Ivyholme at Dulwich College. Sandy Wilson is fourth from left in the front row; Peter Parker is sixth from left.

Learning Japanese

Official secrecy and institutional rivalry obscured the achievements of two crash programmes hastily launched to teach Japanese during the Second World War. 

Four plates from an album of spirit photographs, attributed to Frederick Hudson, 1872.

Fake Views

The 19th-century craze for spiritualism ‘resurrected’ the dead through manipulated photography, a practice that boomed with the trauma caused by war – though it was not without its sceptics.