History Today

Richard Cavendish visits the newly-opened Cadbury World in Birmingham.

Angela Morgan discusses sugared heritage and a new exhibition

In its desperate battle to fight off the advancing Germans, the Soviet Union called on its women to play as active and probably more wide-ranging a role as its men. John Erickson records the military and civilian efforts during the Great Patriotic War.

The medium and message - Miri Rubin looks at how the changing theology and doctrine of late medieval Christianity led to the creation of a popular event with social and hierarchical overtones.

'Woe unto the land whose king is a child'; but despite a foreign claimant and rebellious barons, a nine-year-old monarch was steered successfully to adulthood in twelfth-century England by loyal guardians. David Carpenter tells how it was done and its impact on future constitutional developments in the Middle Ages.

In the light of the revised interest in the Soviet cinema Richard Taylor questions whether our traditional view of its output after 1917 as mere uplift (dreary or otherwise) is justified.

Ann Hills explores heritage Down Under.

Lesser breeds without the law? In a revealing new study of the Hellenistic world in the three centuries after Alexander carved out an empire in the East, Peter Green argues that condescension and cultural arrogance rather than a mission to civilise marked Greek reaction to the population they ruled over.

Scott Goodfellow on the row over archaeology by tender.

'After the love of God, I am intoxicated with the love of Prophet Mohammad. If you call it infidelity, by God I am the greatest Infidel'. Francis Robinson looks at the nineteenth-century Punjabi whose proclamation of a role as 'promised Messiah' still brings hostility from orthodox Muslims to the movement he spawned.