As it sought independence, Iceland gained a new significance for Britain during the latter stages of the First World War, writes Ben Markham.  At the turn of the twentieth century, Iceland was not an independent country. Isolated in the North Atlantic Ocean, it was nonetheless considered an integral part of...

Matt Jux-Blayney explores the impact of the blues singer Muddy Waters against a backdrop of significant social and racial change in the United States of the mid-twentieth century. On 3 July 1960, a man from Mississippi was introduced onto the stage of the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. He...

5 Editorial (Read article) 6 Ending Camelot: the assassination of John F Kennedy – Nicolas Kinloch (Read article) 11 Letters 12 Anti-Americanism in Britain during the Second World War – Kit Kowol (Read article) 17 The portrayal of historians in fiction: people on the edge? – Michael Bender (Read article) 22 Doomed to...

Not everyone loves the capital of the United States. To Ulysses S Grant, it was a ‘pestilential swamp’; to novelist Gore Vidal, a ‘city of the dead’. It is true that Washington still has its problems. The District of Columbia has the highest crime rate in the United States, and the...

History Abridged: In this feature we take a person, time, theme or event and tell you the vast rich history in small space. A long dip into history in a shortened form. See all History Abridged articles The ‘Monroe Doctrine’ in 1825 provided a cornerstone for future United States foreign policy. Drafted...

The Tenement Museum is not remotely like any museum I had previously visited. It is an old tenement building where generations of New York migrants lived and loved, worked and had families before moving both on and out. The Tenement Museum tells the story of the Lower East Side through the...

The American Revolution presented all who lived through it with difficult choices about allegiance, identity, and self-interest.  The responses of American loyalists, enslaved people, and Native Americans reveal much about the country’s revolutionary foundation and the United States of today. The American Revolution was at once universal and narrowly nationalistic....

Why did American military involvement in Vietnam fail?  In this article, David McGill explains why the United States never had a realistic chance of defeating the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies. The decision by the United States government to become involved in supporting the South Vietnamese government against the...

The Second World War saw the development of significant anti-Americanism in Britain. This article locates the centre of wartime anti-Americanism in the politics of Conservative imperialists, who believed the USA was trying to deliberately dismantle the British Empire in order to fulfil its own imperial ambitions. The Second World War...

The murder of America’s thirty-fifth president is often regarded as one of the key events in the recent history of the United States. Numerous conspiracy theories have made it appear more complex, and more mysterious, than was in fact the case. No event in recent American history has been more comprehensively...

Anthony Ruggiero reveals how United States foreign policy evolved from its effective adherence to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 into securing its own overseas ‘empire’. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was pivotal in launching the United States into recognition as an empire.  Following the war, the United Sates accepted its role...

Philip Woods discusses Evelyn Waugh’s contribution to understanding the nature of journalism before the Second World War. This article compares the value to historians of the two books Evelyn Waugh wrote based on his experiences as a war correspondent covering the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–36. The popular satiric novel Scoop (1938) is...

Graham Faiella guides us through the historical evidence and literary speculation surrounding one of the ultimately unresolved incidents of recent times. One hundred and fifty years ago, sometime between 25 November and 4 December 1872, the brigantine Mary Celeste was abandoned at sea somewhere between the Azores and the coast of Portugal....

“For lust of knowing what should not be known— We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.” So wrote poet James Elroy Flecker in 1913, who had perhaps an unduly romantic view of what motivated many of Uzbekistan’s earlier visitors. A more realistic explanation was proffered in the thirteenth century by the Persian...

Patrick J Pead writes about a truly remarkable woman whose contribution to advances in medicine deserves far wider recognition. Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live...

Adrian Smith investigates an abortive plan for the earl to intervene in Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Earl Mountbatten of Burma boasted a unique CV: Chief of Combined Operations, Supreme Commander South-East Asia, Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord, Chief of the Defence Staff, and Viceroy of India. Yet somehow...

David Shipp analyses the state of socialism in the Soviet Union, from Brezhnev to Chernenko. ‘What is he thinking of? Reform, reform. Who needs it, and who can understand it? We need to work better, that is the only problem.’ These reported words of Leonid Brezhnev epitomise the view of the period...

Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War.  Their experiences are little remembered today, neither in the West where a Euro/US-centric memory of the war dominates, nor in South Asia, which privileges nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire. What was it like...

August 2022 marks 75 years since British India was divided at independence into two separate states: India and Pakistan (the latter including today’s Bangladesh). As with the 70th commemoration in 2017, this anniversary will trigger a great deal of collective remembering in Britain just as in South Asia itself. Freedom from...

The 1980s are often viewed as marking the repudiation of the political order marked by the New Deal and the 1960s, both periods of enormous social, political, and cultural change. Yet the decade symbolised by President Ronald Reagan, far from being a period of triumphant conservative counterrevolution, was a period...