History Today

What were the origins of Charles Darwin's particular species of genius?

Dracula, the vampire that haunts our dreams, is the one created by the 19th-century author, Bram Stoker: but, as Paul Dukes explains here, there is a basis in fact and eastern European legend for the ghoul.

'Thrice had his foot Domingo's island prest, Midst horrid wars and fierce barbarian wiles; Thrice had his blood repelled the yellow pest That stalks, gigantic, through the Western Isles!' ran the epitaph to one of the more than 20,000 British soldiers sent to St. Domingue in the 1790s.

The art of India is a vital cultural expression of India. As Partha Mitter explains, it is intertwined with assertions of nationalism, the equation of modernisation and westernisation, and a desire to preserve the cultural heritage of India.

The British had been trading in India since 1600. As R.W. Lightbown, it was not, however, until the late eighteenth century that British interest in Indian culture burgeoned and was carried home by the traveller.

Keith Robbins poses the question of religious and political affinities of Roman Catholics in the context of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

The visit of Pope John Paul II to England, Scotland and Wales, has brought to the fore interest in the complex relations which have existed between the Papacy and religion and politics in post-Reformation Britain. In the first of these articles, Eamon Duffy traces the path of the dilemmas and allegiances of English Catholics since the Reformation.

David Starkey provides a historiographical guide to the fifteenth century English monarchy.

To hundreds of thousands of Indians the British Raj was personified by its administrative arm, the Indian Civil Service, explains Ann Ewing, by which the British governed its imperial possession through a small élite spread thinly throughout the vast sub-continent.

The Falkland Islands were at the centre of dispute in 1770 – but was the conflict really over those far-away islands, or was it the political future of the French Secretary of State, Choiseul, that was at stake?