History Fiend

We ask four historians whether the demise of one of the 20th century’s superpowers was as inevitable as it now seems. Soviet poster dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution and IV Congress of the Communist International, 1922. Wiki Commons. ‘No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario’ Rodric Braithwaite,  British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91) and author of  Armageddon and Paranoia: the Nuclear Confrontation  (Profile, 2017). People still argue about the fall of the Roman Empire. They are not going to agree quickly on why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did. Some think it could have lasted for many years, others that the collapse was unforeseeable. Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident scientist, foresaw it decades before it happened. Victory in war took the Soviet armies to the centre of Europe, where they stayed. The Soviet Union’s seductive ideology had already given it influence across the world. But after Stalin’s death in...

The global crisis wrought by the First World War prompted the birth of free mental health care. Photograph of the matron and staff of the Lady Chichester Hospital, Hove, 1921. East Sussex Record Office. Free mental health care began 100 years ago, after the First World War, when a handful of doctors and voluntary workers established clinics and hospitals that drew on the ‘talking therapies’ used to treat shell-shocked soldiers. One of the first outpatient psychotherapy units in Britain was the Tavistock Clinic, which opened on 27 September 1920 at 51 Tavistock Square in the Bloomsbury area of London. ‘My dream has come true’, said its founder, the Scottish neurologist Hugh Crichton-Miller. He and six other doctors worked  pro bono  to treat early signs of mental illness, referred to then as functional mental disorders. Crichton-Miller wanted ‘to bring modern treatments for such conditions within reach of those who cannot afford specialists’ fees’. Students, clerks and housewiv...

Four historians consider the most fundamental question of all, one famously posed by E.H. Carr almost 60 years ago. The Owl of Athena: Terracotta lekythos (oil flask) c. 490–480 BC. Metropolitan Museum of Art. ‘History is the study of people, actions, decisions, interactions and behaviours’ Francesca Morphakis, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Leeds History is narratives. From chaos comes order. We seek to understand the past by determining and ordering ‘facts’; and from these narratives we hope to explain the decisions and processes which shape our existence. Perhaps we might even distill patterns and lessons to guide – but never to determine – our responses to the challenges faced today. History is the study of people, actions, decisions, interactions and behaviours. It is so compelling a subject because it encapsulates themes which expose the human condition in all of its guises and that resonate throughout time: power, weakness, corruption, tragedy, triumph … Nowhe...

The Wars of the Roses were the civil wars fought in England and Wales between the Yorkist and Lancastrian dynasties between 1455 and 1485. Though historians can’t agree on precisely when and where the conflicts concluded, the general consensus is that the Wars of the Roses ended with the battle of Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII, the first Tudor king) defeated and killed Richard III... But, argues historian Matthew Lewis, the roots of these dynastic civil wars went deeper and the branches reached further than this 30-year timeframe suggests. Here, writing for  History Extra , Lewis shares 12 lesser-known facts about the Wars of the Roses… 1 Jack Cade’s rebellion rocked the Lancastrians In July 1450, a mysterious man known as Jack Cade led a huge force of common men from Kent into London to protest against the ailing government of  the Lancastrian king Henry VI.  This episode is generally regarded as being outside the bounds of the War...