Browse all Reviews
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/9780197530474.jpg?itok=ZbfXhBbe)
Sometimes (not often enough) an academic book comes along that ticks all the boxes: it is based on thorough research, spanning archives on different continents, engaging with rich and varied source materials; it is held together by a tight set of themes; it is written in beautiful prose.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/carib_vidal.jpg?itok=yhNGmhKB)
In Caribbean New Orleans Cécile Vidal has brought together a prodigious volume and range of archival research in what is the most detailed social history of the city during the French period.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Townsend.jpg?itok=cQVeXQ31)
It is difficult to believe now that generations of scholars in the 20th century argued with insistence that the indigenous cultures of the Americas were destroyed by European imperial expansion.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Asaka.jpg?itok=9tWTuO2b)
Ikuko Asaka opens this ambitious book by referencing the climatic and geographic rebuttal of black journalist and abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Driver_cold_morning.jpg?itok=fyVxlpwo)
In 1833, after centuries of resistance and rebellion by enslaved people, decades of popularly-mobilized antislavery protests, and years of economic struggle on colonial plantations, England’s Parliament initiated the process of slave emancipation in the British Empire.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/May_0.jpg?itok=Y6nJ6xKx)
Most canonical interpretations of the American Civil War revolve around some facet of the great national contest over the status and future of slavery in the western territories.