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In the latest of our occasional Reviews in History podcast series, Daniel Snowman talks to Margaret MacMillan about her background, career, key publications and future plans.
Margaret MacMillan is Professor of International History at the University of Oxford.
Daniel Snowman is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster on social and cultural history.
About two thirds of the way through his brief but informative survey of Global Cities: A Short History Greg Clark, an international mover and shaker in the field and Fellow at the Global Cities Initiative (and other prominent think-tanks and universities), reproduces a graph, based on Google Ngram Viewer data, measuring the approximate occurrence of ‘world’ and ‘global city’ in book fo
Despite the back cover declaring Lloyd Gardner’s The War on Leakers ‘the essential backstory to understand the Snowden case, NSA eavesdropping, and the future of privacy’, and its subtitle promising a study ‘from Eugene V. Debs to Edward Snowden,’ it would be inaccurate to describe this book as a historical work.
How does one define empire? What are the characteristics of a successful empire? These two questions arise foremost after reading John Darwin’s monumental masterpiece After Tamerlane. In nine succinct chapters with informative titles, Darwin encompassed 600 years of global history, supported by illustrations and maps and for those interested, suggestions for further reading.
Randall Packard’s The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria, published in 2007, was a timely overview of the history of one of the most complex and ancient of all diseases. Indeed, Packard’s sub-title: ‘a short history of malaria’ is a modest one considering the depth and breadth of the range of topics relating to the history of malaria that Packard covers.
From a public health perspective the disease of smallpox was officially declared eradicated in 1980 – the result of a successful global initiative led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the first and to date only success against a disease in humans. The world could celebrate its freedom from a dreaded disease.
Hardly had the fighting petered out on the Somme in November 1916 than one American reviewer, W. S. Rusk, was warning scholars that much writing about the Great War would be lost to the ‘winnowing flail of time’.(1)
Hard Choices details Hillary Rodham Clinton’s four years as Secretary of State, from 2009 to 2013.
Exile has long been central to our understanding of certain Early Modern topics. The flight of English Protestants, and then Catholics, to the Continent in the 16th century, or the exodus of Huguenots (many to England and Ireland) after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the 17th, are perhaps the best known examples to UK audiences.