USA

Mark Rathbone assesses the importance of the office of 'Veep' (VP) over the past 220 years.

Bitter feelings between Loyalists and Patriots after the British surrender at Yorktown led to many skirmishes and retaliations.

Greg Carleton explains how disastrous defeats for the Soviet Union and the US in 1941 were transformed into positive national narratives by the two emerging superpowers.

Andrew Boxer demonstrates the ways in which external events affected the struggles of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

King's 'I Have a Dream' speech in Washington DC on August 28th, 1963, was admired all over the world. Richard Cavendish provides a short biography of Martin Luther King.

Viv Saunders reveals how sport and society are intertwined.

Patricia Cleveland-Peck looks at the long history of plant dispersal between the New World and the Old.

The American Civil War was not a simple struggle between slaveholders and abolitionists, argues Tim Stanley.

Six years after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc in New Orleans Thomas Ruys Smith looks at its impact in the light of the city’s historic troubles.

Richard Cavendish charts the life of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was born on June 14th, 1811.

The Hindenburg disaster marked the beginning of the end for airship travel. Yet what is often forgotten today is that, until the 1930s, airships were a popular and luxurious way to travel.

Alex von Tunzelmann reassesses a two-part article on the troubled relationship between the United States and Cuba, published in History Today 50 years ago in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Michael Dunne marks the 50th anniversary of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro's Cuba.