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: 
1 Jan 2011

Issues related to homosexuality are currently at the forefront of public discourse. Globally, but particularly in the United States, marriage equity, military service, queer youth and bullying are not just matters of policy debate, but have engaged popular concern and action as well.

Review Date: 
1 Nov 2010

For more than half its existence as a discrete though intensely varied musical form, jazz lacked a scholarly literature. Periodicals ruled the roost. In the USA Metronome, founded in 1881, and Downbeat, first published in 1936, dominated, reviewing records, profiling leading instrumentalists and chronicling music industry gossip.

Review Date: 
1 Oct 2010

How a country deals with enemy nationals within its territory during times of war is as much an issue today as it has ever been. In the western world these days such enemy nationals are most likely to be involved in the ‘war on terror’, and can be found masked behind a multiplicity of nationalities.

Review Date: 
1 Jul 2010

How many of us would happily make do without a fully equipped modern kitchen – even if it sometimes beats like a transplanted artificial heart at the centre of an artisan cottage stripped back to its original organic floorboards and fireplace?

Review Date: 
30 Apr 2010

At the height of summer in August 1996, The New Republic featured a front cover that depicted a young African American woman smoking a cigarette while feeding her baby. The words ‘Day of Reckoning’ were emblazoned in bold letters across the image, and the exhortation by the editors to ‘Sign the Welfare Bill Now’ was prominently placed underneath the photograph.

Review Date: 
31 Aug 2009

This is an ambitious and weighty study of prisons, prison labour and penology from the early Republican period through the Depression years which McLennan argues has been characterised by ‘a long continuum of episodic instability, conflict, and political crisis’ (p. 2).

Review Date: 
30 Apr 2009

Georgine Clarsen has produced a fascinating account of women motorists in the first three decades of the automobile age. Her crisp and elegant prose takes the reader on a speedy trip over a wide range of terrain, indicating the importance of the car in the cultural politics of the early 20th century.

Review Date: 
31 Mar 2009

In Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after the Civil War, Scott Giltner delivers an intriguing and thoughtful survey of sporting cultures and racial identity in the postbellum South. The study, which, as the author notes, evolved from ‘masters proposal to dissertation to book’ (p.

Review Date: 
1 Jan 2009

I think I would like Gerald Shenk but I am not certain that I agree with him. I like the fact that he does not make any secret of where his allegiances lie.

Review Date: 
31 Oct 2008

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s volume makes an important, accessible and timely contribution to the literature and historiography of the FBI. Among its many positives, two stand out.

Pages