Periodical of the Week #1 - History Today

Author: lamescholar - 2024-10-18

I collected a number of periodicals available on the Internet in Magazines. To further promote these sources of knowledge and recreation, I came up with an idea of a series of weekly posts that would overview these periodicals. The first Periodical of the Week is History Today.

History Today is British monthly history magazine. The articles are written by professional historians for general audience. Along with articles the issues feature book reviews of new history books. It’s probably the best popular history magazine.

There are no PDFs of most recent issues. But there is a way to get new issues. You can get 3 printed issues for 5 pounds:
https://www.historytoday.com/subscription/try-history-today

Just don’t forget to cancel the subscription before the trial ends unless you want to get charged for a whole year. To cancel the subscription write an email:
subscriptions@historytoday.com

Here’s 4 recent issues I obtained this way (received 1 extra):

A bunch of issues can be found here:
https://downmagaz.net/tags/history%20today/

Older issues are available on Internet Acrhive:
https://archive.org/details/pub_history-today?sort=date

To access them you need to fill this form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScSBbT17HSQywTm-fQawOK7G4dN-QPbDWNstdfvysoKTXCjKA/viewform

Use this Python script to make PDFs of these issues.

For this particular magazine I figured out that you need to pre-process images in IrfanView:
RESIZE: 50%
Sharpen: 30

Then encode PDF with LuraTech PDF Compress with these settings:
Profile: Photo
Quality: 7

Result:
https://disk.yandex.ru/i/chWxsj5wqWS9Ew

This is March issue of 1998. There are a playful article about dangers of reading (page 11) and an article about Walter Raleigh - the man who was sent by queen Elizabeth I to explore the New World (page 17).

It’s a crime that you need to go roundabouts for knowledge. Old issues of History Today should be freely available. All good sources should be widely and freely distributed for purposes of the enlightenment.