Browse all Reviews
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/khalidi.jpg?itok=YeSGEQfQ)
Early in his single-term presidency, Jimmy Carter dismissed as ‘just semantics’ a flap that arose after he extemporaneously echoed Israel’s position that any peace settlement with its neighbours required ‘defensible borders’.(1) In fact, as his aides quickly clarified, Carter had actually meant a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders with minor adjustments for s
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/brown_0.jpg?itok=DQkdWQQ3)
Michael Brown’s latest book, Disunited Kingdoms: Peoples and Politics in the British Isles: 1280–1460, examines the socio-political development of Britain and Ireland during the late medieval era.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/kosto.jpg?itok=U02cSI3A)
The word ‘hostage’ might immediately bring to mind hostile situations: the entrapment of a wealthy businessman’s daughter in exchange for money, a terrorist incident (1) or a manifestation of domestic abuse.(2) However, the meaning of hostageship has undergone many transformations over time, some of which are brought under the microscope Profe
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/sim.jpg?itok=xPwvGV_v)
Ireland’s protracted struggle for freedom from British rule has long occupied an important place in American imaginations. Few historians, however, have treated America’s sympathy for Ireland as a matter of formal state-to-state diplomacy.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/eaton.jpg?itok=kctvxT2q)
Buried deep within the endnotes of Joseph Eaton’s book is a wry comment on the art of reviewing by the 19th-century author Sydney Smith, ‘I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so’ (p. 199, n. 32).
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/phelps.jpg?itok=CwqrKdNY)
The sprawling geographic, linguistic, and ethnic polyglot of Habsburg Europe makes an unexpected point of comparison with the United States. Bordering, at its western extremity, the Untersee and Lithuanian-Swiss border; and, at its eastern limits, reaching Kronstadt on the Transylvanian-Romanian border, the Habsburg Empire was the economic and cultural dynamo at the heart of Central Europe.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/mitter.jpg?itok=dFvTtjik)
This book is the culmination of an ambitious multi-year research project, of which I was a part, wherein Rana Mitter proposed to re-examine as many aspects as possible of China’s experience of the highly destructive, eight-year war with Japan.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/clavin.jpg?itok=IKLoRD4U)
In September 2012, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon officially opened a new reading room for the League of Nations archives in Geneva. After four decades in a room with barely enough space for more than a handful of scholars, the League's archives are now accessible in the refurbished ‘Rockefeller room’, with seating for 24 researchers.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/seymour.jpg?itok=PN17gjzu)
In a new development for Reviews in History, Daniel Snowman talks to Miranda Seymour about her new book, Noble Endeavours: Stories from England; Stories from Germany, her career as a historian, historical novelist and biographer, and the issues surrounding collective biography and prosopography.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/mcgowan.jpg?itok=RLUaHJre)
Dynastic marriages were of crucial importance in early modern Europe. Looking at the international scenario, the consequences of a marriage agreement between European ruling houses could be compared to those generated by the outbreak of a war or the signing of a peace treaty.