PAST PRESENT – What’s new in History

The subject is the Vietnam War. Dispatches (1977) reports remarkable front-line encounters with an acid-dazed infantryman who can’t wait to get back into the field and add Viet Cong kills to his long list (‘I just can’t hack it back in the World’, he says); with a helicopter door gunner who fires indiscriminately into crowds

Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kurlansky and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kurlansky) so brilliantly relates here, salt has shaped civilisation from the beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured

The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is an influential and pivotal work of English social history, written by New Left historian E. P. Thompson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson). It concentrates on English artisan and working class society in its formative years 1780 to 1832. Its tone is captured by the oft-quoted line from the preface:   ‘I

The Age of Reform (1955) by Richard Hofstadter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter) is a landmark in American political thought. It examines the passion for progress and reform that coloured the entire period from 1890 to 1940 – with startling and stimulating results. It searches out the moral and emotional motives of the reformers, the myths and dreams in which they

The history of the 20th century is marked by two great narratives: nations locked in savage wars over ideology and territory, and scientists overturning the received wisdom of preceding generations. According to Paul Johnson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Johnson_(writer) and http://pauljohnsonarchives.org/), the modern era begins with one of the second types of revolutions, in 1919, when English astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington