History Today

Hugh Purcell examines the impact on either side of the Atlantic of Ken Burns’s tour de force, The Civil War.

Richard Cavendish paddles along with the Coracle Society.

Keith Nurse reveals news of Anglo-Saxon jewellery find in Suffolk.

Lord Byron has gone down in history as the 'poet at war' supporting the Greek struggle for independence, but here Richard Lansdown uncovers his involvement with another mysterious nationalist group in 19th-century Italy, a tale of secrecy, symbolism and masonic rituals.

Gareth Stedman Jones argues that an exciting revaluation of narrative analysis of the 'workshop of the world' is on the way through the political and intellectual upheavals of the 1980s.

In the tercentenary year of the death of the founder of the Society of Friends, Michael Mullett takes a look at the outlook and achievement of a man to whom 'all things were new'.

Peter Marshall considers the past impact and present influence of Marxist models to the history of Europe's encounters with other continents.

Professor Charles Boxer looks at a fascinating East-West encounter where science and mathematics were trailed as tempters for a Chinese gospel.

Stuart Andrews considers the life and radical milieu of the dissenting preacher whose support first for the American and then the French Revolutions brought him public controversy, and in the case of the latter, triggered Edmund Burke's classic denunciation of 1789.

The first modern constitution in Europe? On the occasion of its bicentenary, Robert Frost looks at the background to a landmark in Polish history which, though it triggered the final disaster of partition by the country's greedy neighbours, was a work of enlightened reform, not revolution.