Browse all Reviews

Angela McCarthy has written a useful book about Irish emigration to New Zealand, based upon 253 letters that passed between the two countries over a period just short of a century. This review discusses the author's methodology and findings through the perspective of two analytical tools, Alice's Letters and Shanacoole Exceptionalism.

The literature on the role of the French as ‘other’ in the formation of a British national identity in the eighteenth century is probably not as rich as many readers might think.(1) Indeed, the literature on French Anglophobia seems a little more sustained.(2) Semmel’s work, which looks at the impact of Napoleon on British politi

The Recycling of the English Middle Class

In a curious display of cross-partisan consensus, politicians from both major parties in the US frequently tout the capacity of charitable and non-profit organisations to address the abiding problems of poverty, deprivation and neglect in post-industrial, post-welfarist, and post-Cold War society. George H. W.

The post-1965 immigration to the United States is larger and far more diverse than the 'New Immigration,' which had such profound an impact upon virtually every aspect of American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. David M.

Karen Harvey's Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture is a cogently argued, well researched, and accessible account of the ways erotic discourse shaped eighteenth-century understandings of gendered bodies.

In recent decades, the fields of women's and gender studies have rapidly expanded. In trying to understand women's roles in past societies, historians have paid particular attention to issues surrounding marriage, family, and the household.

Eddy Higgs’s work on the census is much valued, not least because he is both a working, researching and publishing historian as well as an experienced archivist.

Susan Barton's book lives up to its promise of providing a new and fuller analysis of the ways in which working-class people were able to enjoy holidays away from home, mainly in the 'age of the railway', but with reference also to the tramping artisan tradition that predated the railways, and to the ear

Kathryn Morrison’s task has been enormous: covering just about a thousand years of retail architecture, this work comprises a magnificent collection of visual material and concise history drawn from primary and secondary data.