The Great Railway Show
Sarah Jane Evans visits the National Railway Museum, York, with its emphasis on social history, science and technology and interactive exhibition.
History Today
June 1940
A failure of national will in a decadent country, outgunned, outmanned and divided by class conflict? Douglas Johnson opens our summer series of Second World War reappraisals by looking at the myths and legacies of the fall of France to Hitler's blitzkrieg fifty years ago this month.
Rewriting Russia's Revolution
Evan Mawdsley discusses how scholarship both inside and outside the Soviet Union, spurred on by the political somersaults in the East, is revising our view of Lenin, the events of 1917 and after.
Stalin and de Gaulle
'You played your hand well. Well done.' High praise indeed from Stalin to an uneasy ally, as John Young describes in this account of the one and only meeting of 'Uncle Joe' and France's 'Man of Destiny'.
May Days And After
From joyous spring rite to politicised holiday – Chris Wrigley traces the annexation of May Day through the efforts of the increasingly active labour movement in the early 1890s.
Vichy: Pétain’s Hollow Crown
In 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain took the helm of a humiliated France. While Vichy endured, many took his silence as evidence of grand strategy – a view bolstered by the client press.
Covenanting Revolution and Municipal Enterprise
Allan Macinnes traces how commercial prosperity and economic assertiveness (fuelled by religious radicalism) led to Glasgow's participation in resistance to Charles I in the 1630s, and to a model for a future constitutional Scotland.
Scotland's Neglected Enlightenment
Glasgow's role in the Enlightenment is often overshadowed by Edinburgh, but Roy Campbell shows that the impetus came from the West with the pioneering work done in the city from the early years of the eighteenth century.
Glasgow's Glorious Glass
Michael Donnelly recounts his search for the glowing images from Glasgow's Victorian and Edwardian past, which amply testify to the flowering of the city's artistic genius and the innovatory techniques of its craftsmen.
The Tobacco Lords of Glasgow
Smoke gets in your eyes – but it also made the fortunes of the Clydeside merchants who shipped in the golden leaf from the New World and transformed Glasgow into an international commercial centre. Tom Devine tells how they did it.