This is a survey of recent work on the problem of recognizing topological manifolds among topological spaces, including the results of J.L. Bryant, S.C. Ferry, W. Mio and S. Weinberger in higher dimensions, and M.V. Brahm, R.J. Daverman and D. Repovs in dimension three.This paper is in its final form and no version of it will be submitted for publication elsewhere.