History Today

Kathleen Burk looks at the recent history weekend organised at Long Wittenham, a village of less than a thousand residents on the River Thames in south Oxfordshire.

Good quotes are rare in the history of science. The striking utterances which scientists have managed to produce are often over-used.

Museums are getting increasingly self-conscious about the artificialities they embody. Even if they can stave off the claim that objects collected through wealth and conquest ought to be sent home again they are showing more recognition that taking things from their original settings destroys an important part of their meaning.

Tsar Peter drew on the knowledge and experience of Western Europe to benefit a Russia 'still groping in the dark' and attempted to 'put other civilised nations to the blush'

Judging by the anodyne results of the Anglo-Irish summit last November, the Government has ignored the suggestions of the Kilbrandon Inquiry's Report on Northern Ireland published just before the premiers met; but historians should not repeat the omission.

Paul Preston expresses both a historic and a musical interpretation of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.

History with the people left out? Arid quantification? Or study of the essential motivating force of society? Six historians answer.

It may have lacked the newsworthy drama of the earlier acts, but the Reform legislation of 1884-85 wrought 'great organic changes in the British constitution', writes Paul Adelman.

Christopher Abel and Colin M. Lewis analyse the state of history writing on Latin America, from a 1980s standpoint.