The prominence of the Dutch in global trade, combined with the industry of their press, made the 18th-century Dutch Republic an unrivalled news hub. Ambassadors and unofficial agents acting for foreign governments or for themselves descended on the Netherlands to …

In 2019 I travelled to Caen in Normandy to visit the Abbey of Holy Trinity and accidentally attended a baptism. The church was built by Queen Mathilda of Flanders in 1066, the same year her husband, Duke William, successfully subjugated …

In the early 1800s harsh desert landscapes in North America’s West, including the Sonoran, Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Great Basin deserts, were considered a major obstacle by early advocates of US westward expansion. But when the Mexican-American War ended in 1848 …

Much of the world’s population lives under revolutionary regimes. Cambodia, China, France, Greece, Haiti, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, the United States, even the United Kingdom, that distant descendant of the Glorious Revolution: all entered their modern histories with a revolution. …

What was revolutionary about the French Revolution? Contemporary critics such as Edmund Burke lamented that France’s tyro politicians had squandered a golden opportunity to renew with a useable past. Had they found nothing to salvage from their own traditions, he …

The 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 1968 prompted a moment of soul searching for many women frustrated at how little progress seemed to have been made towards equality. One of these was Joyce Butler, the backbench Labour and Co-operative …

Idi Amin is often considered Africa’s most notorious postcolonial dictator. Around the time of his government’s fall in 1979, dozens of accounts and biographies emerged, each telling horrific stories of brutality. Henry Kyemba, a former minister in Amin’s government, published …

If you haven’t yet read the History Today Books of the Year Part 1, you can find it here. ‘An exploration of issues relevant to anyone interested in the practice of history’ George Bodie Lecturer in History at Goldsmiths, University …

Read this book’s title, and you might guess that David Hempton – perhaps the world’s greatest historian of Methodism – has written a textbook: a survey of Christianity across the past five centuries. Read it again, and you might imagine …

‘This is much more than the history of a place’ Erik Linstrum is Professor of History at the University of Virginia Sam Wetherell’s Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Head of Zeus) is a mesmerising panorama of the postwar, postimperial, …