History Today

Peter Ling captures Edison's last breath and other icons of American progress at the Ford Museum at Greenfield Village.

John Cummins uses the 400th anniversary of Sir Francis Drake's death to reassess the man, his life and the legends surrounding him.

On a cold January morning in 1649 Charles I stepped out onto a scaffold in Whitehall and into history, seen by some as a tyrant, by others as a martyr. But how far was the intellectual climate of mid-17th-century England ready for the republic that followed? Sarah Barber presents the latest thinking.

Ann Hills introduces the Popular Flying Association - builders of prototypes and historical reenactments.

Penelope Johnston discovers four Martello Towers in the Great Lakes, Canada.

Alison Peden looks at what the Middle Ages speculated on and thought was theologically correct about the edges of the medieval world.

Joyce Ellis looks at how women coped with and were able to exploit the urban environment between 1688 and 1820.

A budding front-bench politician and his mistress ... not a tract for our times but an 1860s relationship recovered and reconstructed from love letters by the politician's biographer, Patrick Jackson.