Browse all Reviews
Historians of the Cold War have long relished the incongruous image of the infamous July 1959 ‘Kitchen Debate’ that saw Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon debate the merits of their respective philosophies in a model American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokol’niki Park.
The period 1910-40 was tumultuous in Mexican history.
It is an ambitious book that would try to cover the Conquest of Mexico, the rise and fall of the country’s hacienda system, the emergence of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the intricacies of Emiliano Zapata’s role in the Mexican Revolution, and the exodus of women from rural regions in the mid-1960s to look for work as ‘household help’ in the nation’s fast-growing capital city.
In Enslaved Women in America: From Colonial Times to Emancipation, Emily West masterfully presents the narrative of women’s lived experiences in slavery through the prism of gender.
Here is a textbook that lives up to the best ideals of the genre. The Long Sixties promises us ‘a brief narrative history of the 1960s – a quick trip, as it were, through a momentous decade’ [p. vi].
Benjamin Franklin in London is a narrative biography of the American ‘founding father’ Benjamin Franklin. As the title suggests, the book substantively concentrates on Franklin in London between 1757 and 1775. During this time, Franklin was an agent advocating colonial interests in Parliament.
Of all the Federal Arts Projects set up as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was, in the words of one contemporary, the ‘ugly duckling’ (p. 35).
The literature surrounding British attitudes toward the American Civil War has a long history extending almost back to the conflict itself, in part because it speaks to a question that has long intrigued academic and popular readers alike; namely, how might the outcome of the conflict been different if the British government had extended diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy or even interve
ugIn the introduction to The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America author Kate Haulman puts forward the question ‘How was fashion political in eighteenth-century British North America?’ In addressing this, she uses fashion as a platform to explore the dynamics of gender relations, societal hierarchies and issues of trans-Atlantic commerce within the politics of 18th-century
Household goods piled along curbs with hand-lettered signs saying ‘free’; never-worn clothing hanging in closets, price tags still in place; vacated college dormitory rooms filled with abandoned throw rugs, hair dryers, bookcases; consultants who help us simplify our lives by getting rid of ‘stuff.’ This is the world of things that many Americans inhabit today.