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In the late 1980s, a promising young African-American actor named Denzel Washington was asked to take a leading role in the movie, Glory. Directed by Edward Zwick, a white liberal, Glory told the story of a relatively minor action in the American Civil War.
Often forgotten in any analysis of American constitutional rights is the extent to which those rights are grounded in the state-level revolutionary settlements prior to 1787.
I suspect that, at some level, Eric Foner was always going to write this book. He openly acknowledges in The Fiery Trial that Lincoln has always loomed large in his research – even if he had not hitherto taken centre stage as subject – ever since he wrote his doctoral dissertation over four decades ago.
Celebrity is becoming a hot topic for academics of all kinds, witnessed by the launch of the journal Celebrity Studies earlier this year.
The massacres of Indians in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by the Paxton Boys in December 1763, have long been a notorious event in that part of the globe. A glance at Kevin Kenny’s bibliography provides a sense of the continuous interest in the killings since the 19th century.
The ‘shock city’ of the 18th century , London was always interesting to onlookers, but between 1763 and 1776 it was particularly interesting. It was the capital city of one of the most successful Great Powers, one that had just emerged the winner in the war with France.
The proliferation of computer databases and the digitization of sources online are transforming the profession. Scholars can now do substantial original research without needing to travel to distant archives. Massive collections of documents are at our fingertips. Online databases are encouraging the democratization of historical research.
In moving the California missions into the public sphere, Reyes has provided us with a rich and multi-layered glimpse into the lives of California women.
In the opening of his recent volume, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, historian James D. Rice informs his readers that the idea for the book began with what he perceived as a ‘hole in the map’ (p. 1).
This is a digitised, full-text searchable collection of the Foreign and Colonial Offices’ entire Confidential Print series relating to North America (Canada, Caribbean and the USA) for the period 1824–1961, an initial batch launched by The National Archives (TNA) with Archives Direct and Adam Matthew Dig