History Today

The Historical Happening

Donald Watt cautions against a history which abandons the study of historical realities in favour of intellectual abstractions.

Liberalism

Peter Clarke presents a review of the historiography on the topic.

Forum: Historians and Words

Christopher Hill continues the forum on words historians use by arguing that things exist before words describe them.

Wenceslas Hollar in Tangier

Gillian Williams on the promise of watercolourist and engraver, Wenceslaus Hollar, when he petitioned Charles II to allow him to accompany the British Ambassador on an expedition to Morocco, that he 'would examine all and take designs, and give his Majesty much better satisfaction'.

Augustus Down the Centuries

'History is a reinterpretation of the past which leads to conclusions about the present' wrote Arnaldo Momigliano. Taking that lead, John M. Carter explores the posthumous images of the Roman emperor, Augustus.

Controlling the Screen: The British Cinema in the 1930s

Films interest the modern historian for they reflect the preoccupations and conventions of an age. In this article, Jeffrey Richards shows how the British cinema-goer in the 1930s saw the world according to the British Board of Censors.

The Victorian Shaftesbury

Although Anthony Ashley Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, was often described as the ‘Prince of Philanthropists’, he himself was aware of the paradoxes of his responses to the ‘Condition of England question’.