History Today

Keith M. Brown assesses the life, death and legacy of Mary Stewart

'Beyond the pale' - the imperialists' vision of the Irish as ignoble savages originated in the attitudes and writings of medieval Englishmen.

Service to the Crown might bring hereditary office and a title for the upwardly mobile of Louis X/V's France, but not acceptance by the traditional 'aristocracy of the sword'. Close scrutiny reveals attempts to incorporate a new breed of noble into an essentially static society.

Penelope Corfield finds that economic progress and new self-awareness in language and gesture disturbed the tranquility of the ‘Age of Elegance'.

The unlikely setting of the East London suburb of Walthamstow was a centre for the infant British cinema industry at the turn of the century. Margaret O'Brien and Julia Holland chart its course, aided by interviews with and recollections of local people, many of whom were involved as 'extras' in the early silent films.

‘Trade follows the flag’ is a truism of imperial expansion but in the 1680s it was the other way round, as the East India Company attempted to challenge the might of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

Julie Richards-Williams on the salvaging of a 17th-century Swedish warship.

The deep conservatism of Castilian life militated against the attempts of reformers to regenerate the kingdom through transformed social values.

The newly-found voices of the slaves caught up in the American Civil War, and heard through letters to their families, are a testimony to their tenacity and unity in the struggle for emancipation.

The hubris of Louis XI's Constable produced his nemesis against a background of incipient French nationalism and a growing royal sense of 'majesty'.