Seventy years ago this week US Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave a speech at Harvard University in which he offered American aid to a destitute and fragile Europe if it proved willing and able to help itself. Britain, …
In the coming weeks, you will notice that it’s much quieter than usual on this blog. It’s because between midnight on Friday 21 April and the general election on Thursday 8 June is the pre-election period. This means that we …
When governments communicate, the medium can be as valuable as the message - and this post shows how official letters demonstrate this - dating from as early as 1258.
The missionary strain in the character of Americans leads many of them to feel that they have now received a call to extend to other countries the blessings with which the Almighty has endowed their own [1] Seventy years ago, …
75 years ago today, on 15 February 1942, British forces surrendered the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Singapore to the Japanese army. Defeat had come swiftly after the landing of Japanese forces in northern Malaya and southern Thailand on 8 December 1941. …
A 100 hundred years ago today the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a telegram that was to have profound consequences for the course of the First World War. At the beginning of 1917 American opinion was anti-German, and largely …
As Cuban as palm trees The death of Fidel Castro at the age of 90 on 26 November 2016 marked the end of an extraordinary life: head of the Cuban government from 1959 until he handed over to his brother …
![Extract of the draft note from 2 January 1917 on 10 Downing Street headed paper which reads 'To: The Private Secretary, the Prime Minister has decided, with a view to keeping himself in close touch with the several departments, to establish a ['Secretariat' is crossed out and replaced by 'Department'] in connection with Office of the First Lord of the Treasury. The following gentlemen have been appointed to act as secretaries to the ['First Lord of the Treasury' is crossed out and replaced by 'new Department']](https://history.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/01/edited-1024x753.jpg)
It is a century since David Lloyd George formed the first ever prime-ministerial policy team, known as the ‘Garden Suburb’.