History

Anything to do with History

Ismael @Ismael - almost 3 years ago

Strength and Guile | History Today

The Special Boat Service is Britain’s original and most secretive special operations unit. Its present incarnation is part of the UK’s Tier 1 Special Forces, which, along with the intelligence services, enables the UK to punch above its weight as a global power, especiall...continued

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Patrick @Patrick - almost 4 years ago

Poking Fun | History Today

According to one of online mythology’s most oft-repeated truisms, if you can conceive of something, there’s porn of it on the internet. To which we might add: if you can imagine something, then someone in history has carved, drawn, painted, etched, handwritten, collaged a...continued

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Zackery @Zackery - over 3 years ago

Long Division | History Today

The British Empire is often presented as an endeavour that conquered territory, carried out atrocities and looted resources. Max Siollun’s What Britain Did to Nigeria provides some evidence to support that case. But Siollun also provides much-needed nuance: British coloni...continued

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Grayce @Grayce - about 3 years ago

Inside Outsider | History Today

Hella Pick was one of Britain’s most successful foreign correspondents at a time when prejudice against women in journalism was strong. Over 60 tumultuous years she covered most of the major events of world history. It was by any standards a glittering career. Yet it is n...continued

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Clarissa @Clarissa - over 5 years ago

I'm A Believer | History Today

‘Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?’ This question, posed by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007), is popular with historians these days. Eve...continued

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Bobby @Bobby - over 2 years ago

Bad with the Good | History Today

In 1791 Edmund Burke, ‘the father of British conservatism’, commented that: We have in London very respectable persons of the Jewish nation whom we will keep: but we have of the same tribe, others of a very different description – housebreakers and receivers of stolen goo...continued

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Hannah @Hannah - about 3 years ago

Royal Rubble | History Today

Last summer Black Lives Matter protests were widespread in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis and statues seen as symbols of racism or colonialism were torn from their pedestals, daubed with graffiti or quietly removed by the authorities in response. Fa...continued

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Moises @Moises - about 3 years ago

Treacherous Waters | History Today

Britain’s intelligence agencies have come in from the cold. Scholars of the secret state have, over the past years, enjoyed several weighty, authoritative works on the secret services and their coordinating machinery in Whitehall. Fascinating though these contributions ar...continued

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Americo @Americo - over 3 years ago

Open Secrets | History Today

This authorised history of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), otherwise the official version of Signals Intelligence (Sigint) in Britain, has been a while coming. It should have been published in 2019 to coincide with the organisation’s centenary, but requ...continued

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Zetta @Zetta - over 2 years ago

Get in the Sea | History Today

After hundreds of years of habitation, what causes a village, town or city to disappear? In the case of Capel Celyn in north Wales, it was water. In the late 1950s Liverpool was in need of a new reservoir to serve its growing population. In 1960 – bypassing the Welsh plan...continued

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Marjory @Marjory - over 3 years ago

The Central Problem | History Today

In recent years concerted efforts have been made to ‘globalise’ the study of the ancient and medieval worlds and to ‘de-centre’ the role of Europe in pre-modern history. Students of the period between the third and seventh centuries have every reason to regard such trends...continued

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Geovany @Geovany - about 3 years ago

Just a Book? | History Today

Ensconced in his Virginia estate, Thomas Jefferson had a secret project. It called for Enlightenment values, biological adhesives and a penknife. For decades Jefferson, the primary drafter of the Declaration of Independence, set his mind to producing another text: his own...continued

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Monserrat @Monserrat - over 3 years ago

Breaking Time’s Arrow | History Today

‘Historians were key architects of empire’, writes Priya Satia, in her meditative, intensive and sweeping critique of the discipline of history. Questions of agency and intention have long been at the heart of historical explanation and critique, but Satia wishes to expos...continued

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Oren @Oren - over 3 years ago

‘Manless Climbing’ | History Today

Shiela Grant Duff was 21 and fresh out of university when she witnessed the violence that followed the Saar plebiscite in 1935. ‘The Nazis can tell their enemies by their eyes’, she wrote in her report for the Observer, warning of the German people’s growing support for N...continued

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Arvid @Arvid - about 3 years ago

New Year’s Revolutions | History Today

For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 1949 was the year of liberation from foreign oppression and feudal backwardness: the beginning of New China, an optimistic vision shared by many non-communists. For their opponents, the year represented the loss of China, as Chiang Ka...continued

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Elliott @Elliott - over 3 years ago

An Odious Story | History Today

Some 75 years after their demise, Hitler and the Third Reich are arguably bigger business now than they have ever been. Their story still dominates television history, while popular history publishing is seemingly as dependent as ever on repackaging and reselling the bale...continued

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Alexie @Alexie - over 3 years ago

The Spy who Loved | History Today

In 1989, as the twice-decorated KGB agent Colonel Ursula Kuczynski shored up the floundering GDR at public rallies in East Berlin, British spy writers turned to tired cliches. ‘Agent Sonya’, wrote Chapman Pincher, had ‘no doubt, obliged her comrades with some easy sex.’ T...continued

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Gregoria @Gregoria - over 2 years ago

What Chips did Next | History Today

The second volume of the unexpurgated diaries of the parliamentarian and social butterfly Chips Channon covers the period spanning Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler in October 1938 to the fall of Mussolini in July 1943. Channon not only records momentous world events, but...continued

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Anderson @Anderson - over 2 years ago

Normal Normans? | History Today

For many, the Normans epitomise the medieval period: known today for their actions as conquerors, castle-builders, kings and warriors, our perceptions of this most prominent of medieval peoples continue to shape our understanding of European history between 900 and 1200.H...continued

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Delia @Delia - over 2 years ago

In the Thick of It

In this highly readable series of essays, the American foreign correspondent Virginia Cowles chronicles her coverage of European conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to Britain’s ‘Invasion Weekend’ of 1941. First printed that year and a bestseller, this reissue opens with...continued

3 minutes read

Cameron @Cameron - over 3 years ago

The Invisible | History Today

The First World War centenary gave us a better understanding of the vast contribution made by the Indian Army to that conflict. The focus, though, was on the soldiers and little was made of the thousands of Indians who travelled to France and Mesopotamia as ‘followers’ an...continued

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Giovanni @Giovanni - about 3 years ago

All Change | History Today

‘There had been dramatic changes in outlook in the course of this remarkable century’, writes Margarette Lincoln in her vast and vivid account of the 100 years that took London from the Gunpowder Plot to the Toleration Act, through civil wars, plague and fire, terrorism a...continued

3 minutes read

Alexander @Alexander - almost 3 years ago

Beginning at the End | History Today

Picture a little girl clinging to the legs of her childhood hero. The man is long dead, so she holds on to his crumbling bronze image. The statue is battered and dented; somebody has sawn off its head. The wry smile underneath the fatherly moustache is gone, so is the mir...continued

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Webster @Webster - over 2 years ago

Half a Life | History Today

This memoir by one of the world’s foremost philosopher-economists promises enormous intellectual delights, until one sadly discovers that it trails off in 1964, well before his receiving the Nobel Prize or his reign as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. What it does of...continued

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Americo @Americo - about 3 years ago

Rebels in Rubber Soles | History Today

He was known at different times and in different places – from Singapore to West Ealing – as Nguyen Tat Thanh, Nguyen Ai Quoc, Bac Ho, or simply ‘Bac’, meaning ‘uncle’. He was a poet, journalist and political agitator. In June 1919 Nguyen Ai Quoc (‘Nguyen the Patriot’) ci...continued

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