History Today

Kenneth Asch on Berlin's opera house, the Deutsche Staatsoper.

Hitler's march into the demilitarised Rhineland heralded Churchill's 'gathering storm' – but could the Fuhrer's bluff have been called and the Second World War prevented? Sir Nicholas Hederson, who as Britain's ambassador in Washington during the Falklands crisis saw diplomatic poker eventually turn to war, offers a reassessment of the events of 1936.

A mission to the heathen? Hugh MacLeod looks at working-class attitudes towards organised Christianity in fin de siecle Berlin and other urban centres.

Brian Dooley assesses the incident which brought the world perilously close to nuclear war.

Ann Hills on the management schemes of the Countryside Commission

Louis Kleber tells the story of how a small group of Spanish friars dotted the west coast of America with outposts of their impact on the native populations they co-opted into their settlement.

How did feudal warlords acquire good breeding and the refinements of culture? David Crouch looks beyond the images of Hollywood and Sir Walter Scott in a revealing new study of how manners and mores developed in the early Middle Ages

Nicholas Russell finds 17th-century conspicuous consumption in the Garden of England.