Covering books and digital resources across all fields of history
Like us on FacebookFollow us on Twitter

ISSN 1749-8155

Browse all Reviews

Review Date: 
7 Dec 2017

Edited volumes serve an important purpose: when executed correctly, they help consolidate a body of scholarship, encourage dialogue between the volume’s contributors and set an agenda for future research. The historical study of trauma has been well-catered for in this respect by Traumatic Pasts, edited by Mark S.

Review Date: 
23 Nov 2017

This book traces trajectories of medical understanding of mind, brain and nerves from pre- to post-war Britain and analyses the impact of the First World War with its shell shock ‘epidemic’ on established medical ideas and practices.

Review Date: 
21 Sep 2017

The emergence of racial classification in conjunction with the Enlightenment Science of Man in the 18th century is a well-known chapter in the history of European ideas. Far less understood are the ways in which this scientific project carried into the 19th and 20th centuries, the investigation of which is Richard McMahon’s purpose in The Races of Europe.

Review Date: 
7 Sep 2017

Tom Crook has written a big book – big in scope, range, and thought. It is both an overview of the institutionalization of public health in England and an interpretation of that event as paradigmatic of the systems and practices of pervasive governance that constitute modernity.

Review Date: 
10 Aug 2017

Over 80,000 cases of shell-shock were officially recognised by British Army personnel during the First World War. The diagnosis remains a culturally and historically resonant symbol of the First World War in Britain. Its significance has been influenced by the famous post-war memoirs of ex-servicemen who recounted their personal experiences of shell-shock.

Review Date: 
13 Jul 2017

William Rosen never had the opportunity to have a signing for his new book that was just released this past May 2017. He never got to do a book tour for Viking, take questions at the end of a talk about source material, or see it for sale on Amazon.

Review Date: 
18 May 2017

Good reference books on the history of alcohol remain few and far between, despite increased interest in the area in the last 20 years.

Review Date: 
27 Apr 2017

At the start of the monograph, McMillen points out that in the first two decades of the 21st century, one billion people will become infected with TB. The WHO’s Stop TB Strategy addresses TB’s synergistic relationship with HIV/AIDS as well as drug-resistant TB.

Review Date: 
9 Mar 2017

From a comparative perspective the health system of the United States has a history that is both representative and idiosyncratic.

Review Date: 
23 Feb 2017

A popular exhibition at the Wellcome Trust in London, running for three months from October 2016, Bedlam: the Asylum and Beyond promised to ‘reimagine the institution, informed by the experiences of the patients, doctors, artists and reformers who inhabited the asylum or created alternatives to it’.

Pages