History Today

View more issues: October 2003, November 2003, January 2004

Articles in December 2003 issue of History Today

• Coming to terms with the past: China.(Today's History)
  by Smith, Steve
• Taking off.
  by Furtado, Peter
• The Danish Foreign Ministry has announced that the remains of the mother of Tsar Nicholas II, will be moved to a cathedral in St Petersburg.(News)(Empress-Dowager Maria Fedorovna)(Brief Article)
• The Gadsden Purchase: December 30th, 1853.(Month Past)
  by Cavendish, Richard
• Touching base.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
  by Aveline, Joe
• DNA tests and microscopic analysis of a lock of Robert Stephenson's hair could determine whether the Victorian engineer took narcotics to cope with 'executive stress', as hinted by his contemporaries.(News)(Brief Article)
• The Long Man of Wilmington, the tallest chalk hill figure in England, could be a 16th-century creation rather than a prehistoric carving.(News)(Brief Article)
• The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284.(The English and the Normans Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066-c. 1220)(From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta England 1066-1215 )(Book Review)
  by Vincent, Nicholas
• Illuminating the Renaissance: Scot McKendrick introduces a major new exhibition of Flemish manuscript illumination opening at the Royal Academy.(Frontline)
  by McKendrick, Scot
• Other December anniversaries.(Calendar)
• The future of Indonesia: Merle Ricklefs seeks clue for the future of the troubled archipelago nation in its distant past.
  by Ricklefs, Merle
• Room with a view: Charlotte Crow glimpses the British Museum's new exhibition of its own original collections in the great King's Library.(Frontline)
  by Crow, Charlotte
• The legend of Robin Hood was embellished to appeal to middle-class Londoners, new research has indicated.(News)(Brief Article)
• An Elizabethan religious book has been discovered behind panelling at a country estate in Derbyshire.(News)(Brief Article)
• Keeping up appearances.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
  by Cearns, Simon
• A fragment of 13th-century stained glass depicting a red cockerel--the only complete portrait of an animal to have survived the dissolution of the monasteries--has been put on public display at Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire, by English Heritage.(News)(B
• A white marble bust of Julius Caesar, only the sixth contemporary portrait of its kind, has been discovered on a Mediterranean island.(News)(Brief Article)
• Dystopia: who needs it? Adrian Mourby shows that the nightmare scenario can be both dire warning and escapist fantasy.(Cross Current)
  by Mourby, Adrian
• Lavrenti Beria executed: December 23rd, 1953.(Months Past)(Biography)
  by Cavendish, Richard
• Spreading the word.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
  by Sulley, P.L.
• British Pathe's film collection has been used to capture millions of historic moments from the late 19th and 20th centuries as individual photographs.(News)(Brief Article)
• A set of early 20th-century printed cards identifying seven 'Habitual Drunkards' convicted in Wolverhampton under the Licensing Act of 1902, have fetched 140 [pounds sterling] at auction.(News)(Brief Article)
• Gustav III of Sweden: the forgotten despot of the age of enlightenment: A.D. Harvey recalls the career of the Swedish king whose assassination inspired a famous opera.
  by Harvey, A.D.
• Gettysburg: Memory, Market and an American Shrine.(Book Review)
  by Smith, Adam (American politician)
• The myth of the aviator and the flight to fascism: Colin Cook looks at the political, philosophical and cultural impact of the idea of aviation in the first half of the 20th century.
  by Cook, Colin
• On the banks of the Neva: British Merchants in St Petersburg before the Russian Revolution: in the final article in our series on Britain and Russia, Swart Thompstone visits the long-lasting community of Britons in the Russian capital.
  by Thompstone, Stuart
• Attlee and Truman: Jerry Brookshire shows that the 'special relationship' in 1945-51 was in safe, and curiously similar, hands.(Cross Current)(Clement Attlee, Harry Truman)
  by Brookshire, Jerry
• Round and about: December.(Calendar)
• A group of Irish and Canadian explorers believe they have located where a ship was lost 158 years ago during Sir John Franklin's attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage.(News)(Brief Article)
• Sir Thomas Blount.(Commons Sense)
• Human kindness.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
  by McLean, Neil
• The Methuen Treaty: December 27th, 1703.(Months Past)
  by Cavendish, Richard
• The Companion Guide to St Petersburg.(Book Review)
  by Furtado, Peter
• A sports researcher from Stirling University has uncovered church reports from the 17th century which she claims show that Scots invented football.(News)(Titantic debris)(Brief Article)
• Historical Atlases: the First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870.(Book Review)
  by Talbert, Richard J.A.
• The remains of 185 German soldiers who died during the German Armed Forces' campaign against the Soviet Union during the Second World War have been discovered in southern Russia.(News)(Brief Article)
• The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730.(Book Review)
  by Hunter, Michael
• Nature and nation: Britain and America in the 19th century: David Lowenthal explores natural history enthusiasms among Victorian Britons and Americans, and finds an explanation for their differing approaches to conservation.
  by Lowenthal, David
• Wrights and wrongs? David Jordan recalls the career of the man Brazilians claim to have been the true pioneer of powered heavier-than-air flight.(Frontline)(Albert Santos-Dumont)
  by Jordan, David
• Obituaries.(History in the Media)(Edward Said)(Pierre Vilar)(Donald Nicol)(Brief Article)