History Today

A pair of new books offer differing takes on the stoicism of British explorers in search of geographical extremes.

Roger Moorhouse on a book that provides a powerful antidote to fashionable nostalgia for life in the GDR.

Wrap your brain around questions on the first English newspaper, the last king of Burma, the real Macbeth and more.

Enter our crossword and win an audiobook of 1215: The Year of Magna Carta.

Italian Fascist scouts meet a member of the Hitler Youth in Padua, October 1940: a picture explained by Roger Hudson.

David Torrance examines a pioneering article, first published in History Today in 1990, which argued that the Scottish Enlightenment was not restricted to Edinburgh but was a genuinely national phenomenon.

What can historical fiction tell us about the past that factual history can’t? Does it distort the record and confuse the reader? What exactly is historical fiction anyway? 

Michael Bloch reviews Norman Davies' Vanished Kingdoms: an 'enjoyable and idiosyncratic historical excursion'.

A selection of readers' correspondence with the editor, Paul Lay.

The black activist Malcolm X was not a civil rights leader. Nor was he a victim of the mass media. He was its beneficiary, in life and death, argues Peter Ling.

The designer of the Colt revolver, the most celebrated killing machine in the history of the Wild West, died on January 10th 1862, aged 47.

Frederick the Great, the man who made Prussia a leading European power, was born on January 24th, 1712.

The Maid of Orléans was born on January 6th 1412: she has been an incarnation of French national identity and pride for six centuries.