History Today

Enterprise and Meaning: Sponsored Film, 1939-1949

William Bird looks at how American business and commerce turned to the techniques of advertising and Hollywood to extol the merits of capitalism and free enterprise in response to the anti-corporate liberalism of the New Deal.

Harry Truman, Small-Town American

'Am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You judge it, I can't'. Alonzo Hamby traces the web of influences from his boyhood in a Mid-West town that shaped the character of America's 33rd president.

Savonarola - Preacher and Patriot?

Donald Weinstein examines the career and context of the extraordinary millenarian friar who held a puritanical sway over Renaissance Florence in the last decade of the fifteenth century.

The Idea of Holy Russia

A state in place or a state of mind? Soviet historian Sergei Averintsev considers the claims on universality and divine legitimacy made by the Russia of the Tsars in response to previous legacies of empire.

Media and Morality in the Twenties

'I want to be naughty and yet be nice' - John D. Stevens recounts how small-town America fought a losing battle against the louche temptations offered by rnagazines, tabloids and the movies.

Eskimo Memories

Remembering the Arctic postmen - Dorothy Harley Eber gathers memories with photographs of the interaction between Inuit and whalers in North West Canada at the turn of the century.

Sex and the Automobile in the Jazz Age

'Brothels on wheels' thundered the moralists but Peter Ling argues the advent of mass motoring in the 1920s was only one of the changes in social and group relationships that made easier the pursuit of carnal desire.

The Assassination of Henry III of France

'For sale, our tyrant King! Five shillings and you can string him up'. Mark Greengrass probes the motives behind and reaction to the murder of France's last Valois monarch.