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In 1979 Pete Wrong of the art collective and Punk band Crass was being interviewed by New Society about his graffiti operation on the London Underground: ‘We don’t just rip the posters down or spray them. We use stencils, neatly, to qualify them.
The planning of cities from the 1940s to the 1960s is one of the major strands of British (and indeed, international) post-war social history.
A recent addition to the Early American Places series, Adam Costanzo’s George Washington’s Washington: Visions for the National Capital in the Early American Republic provides an overview of the development of and visions for Washington, DC, from 1790 to the late 1830s and, thus, spans the administrations of the first seven American presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jef
On 25 March 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York, and quickly began to spread. This floor, as well as the ninth and tenth, housed the Triangle Waist Company, a sweat shop producing ladies’ blouses.
This book deals with the history of the city of Ravenna, near Italy’s north eastern coast, in the period between the fifth and the 11th centuries AD. It comprises an excellent introduction by the editors and 15 chapters of varying lengths. It is well illustrated and has a very useful index, not always the case with edited volumes.
A stigma around the ill-defined genre of popular history lingers in the academy.
Robin Usher’s Protestant Dublin sets out its stall from the beginning: it is a study of symbolic and iconographic landscape of Dublin, the essential purpose of which is to explore ‘how the physical environment conveyed meanings relating [sic] to institutional authority’ (p. 3).
John Rocque (c.1705–62) was a cartographer and engraver of European repute, who could count among his achievements maps of London, Paris, Berlin and Rome.
This is a beautifully illustrated book of serious scholarship and the three editors and the other contributing authors are to be congratulated.
In the words of its author, this engaging book ‘tells of the shadows of objects and of images in the brain and, as such, of the only realities that cannot entirely escape from appropriation’ (p. ix). The object in question is Florence, understood both as a material place and as a mythical construction.