History Today

A number of eminent historians discuss what is history and how is a national history constructed.

'Compare the wealth and refinement of cities such as Mexico... in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the austere simplicity, verging on poverty, of... Philadelphia, a misleading splendour; what was dawn for the United States was twilight for Latin America...' Octavio Paz

Ian R. Smith explores the many titles covering the Boer War.

Peter Stansky encourages the link between the past and present in history.

Throughout Europe, the end of the First World War brought in its wake disillusion, civil unrest and even revolution. As Daniel Francis explains here, it was the same story in Canada in 1919.

‘They dwell in paradise and it pays’ was the view expressed of the immigrant fruit farmers who settled in British Columbia for a long Edwardian summer.

Gertrude Himmelfarb considers why and when poverty ceased to be a ‘natural’ condition and become a ‘social’ problem in the Early Industrial Age.

Slavery would seem to be the epitome of domination by an all-powerful master over a passive, subservient dependent. But is this the whole picture?

Ben Shephard looks at the career of Peter Lobengula, the African ‘Prince’ who tantalised the British press and public and died in poverty in Salford in 1913, highlighting Victorian attitudes towards race, colour and sex.

David Kiyaga-Mulindwa looks in to Southern Africa's early history.