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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
17 Jan 2019

Until recently, Britain’s first referendum on its membership of the European Community (EC), the forerunner of today’s European Union (EU), had not exactly featured prominently in the nation’s collective memory: few people seem to have known that such a vote had ever taken place at all.

Review Date: 
12 Dec 2018

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s Mothers of Massive Resistance tells the story of the grassroots resistance to racial equality undertaken by white women between 1920 and 1970. This book shows how massive resistance was, first and foremost, a grassroots movement driven by white women.

Review Date: 
29 Nov 2018

Lindy Grant’s long awaited and magisterial (although here one particularly laments the lack of a gender-appropriate adjective) book offers us a biography of Blanche of Castile, the Iberian princess famously chosen by her grandmother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, to marry the son of Philip II of France, Lord Louis, the future Louis VIII.

Review Date: 
15 Nov 2018

Catriona Murray’s Imaging Stuart Family Politics is an impressive book, both for its high level of original research, and for its balance of academic sophistication with accessibility.

Review Date: 
15 Nov 2018

As is often the case with (in)famous remarks attributed to prominent personages, there is some doubt about whether Winston Churchill ever did describe the traditions of the Royal Navy as comprising ‘nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.’ Churchill himself reputedly denied that he had, confiding to his private secretary that ‘I never said it. I wish I had’ (p. 1).

Review Date: 
11 Oct 2018

Lee Grieveson’s bold historical analysis of the relationship between media and capital is nothing if not timely. As I write, a new wave of consolidation among traditional telecommunication and media companies in America is concentrating unprecedented wealth and power in the hands of an ever-narrowing elite.

Review Date: 
27 Sep 2018

‘Risen from the ruins and facing the future’ affirmed Johannes Becher’s emphatic opening strophe to the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), composed in that state’s birthyear of 1949. It was a stirring message, and one that amply reflected the political imperative that had come to suffuse the material task of reconstruction after six years of devastating war.

Review Date: 
13 Sep 2018

Dame Anne Salmond is one of New Zealand’s most respected public anthropologists and historians. No one has so effectively and lucidly crossed over between the two disciplines in New Zealand scholarship.

Review Date: 
13 Sep 2018

Work on the European revolutions of 1848 has rolled out at an accelerated rate since their 150th anniversary two decades ago. Much of this newer research has looked at previously unheralded social and cultural dimensions of the revolutionary conjuncture, but politics has remained, necessarily, at the centre of the literature.

Review Date: 
23 Aug 2018

In The Loyal Republic, Erik Mathisen attempts to redefine the way Americans saw themselves, their citizenship and loyalty in the Civil War era.

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