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Edited volumes serve an important purpose: when executed correctly, they help consolidate a body of scholarship, encourage dialogue between the volume’s contributors and set an agenda for future research. The historical study of trauma has been well-catered for in this respect by Traumatic Pasts, edited by Mark S.
During the horrific famine of 1932–3, did Ukrainian peasants die because they were Ukrainians or because they were peasants?
This book traces trajectories of medical understanding of mind, brain and nerves from pre- to post-war Britain and analyses the impact of the First World War with its shell shock ‘epidemic’ on established medical ideas and practices.
The cover of Lindsey Earner-Byrne’s brilliant new book, Letters of the Catholic Poor: Poverty in Independent Ireland 1920–1940, features a collage of letters. One details a husband’s illness, another is a postcard of the Wellington Monument from Dublin’s Phoenix Park with ‘very urgent’ underlined on its face. A further letter pleads for assistance from Fr.
‘Horrible, horrible, it’s horrible.’
‘Oh my! This is gorgeous.’
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‘You are gonna catch a cold.’
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‘Well if I stood next to her I would be the happiest man on earth.’
This is an extremely ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging and inspiring book.
There is selectivity in many of the narratives of how animals’ lives have been shaped by warfare in the 20th century, which often focuses on their bravery and loyalty as they are used and abused on battlefields.
On the face of it Rebe Taylor’s Into the Heart of Tasmania is an intriguing, but essentially straight forward history of one of the many curious connections that define Britain’s imperial and post imperial history.
In Thinking the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder proposes to his friend Tony Judt that the historian’s task is ‘like making paths’ through a forest by leaving signs. Judt qualifies this. ‘The first thing’, he argues, ‘is to teach people about trees. Then you teach them that lots of trees together constitute a forest.
The emergence of racial classification in conjunction with the Enlightenment Science of Man in the 18th century is a well-known chapter in the history of European ideas. Far less understood are the ways in which this scientific project carried into the 19th and 20th centuries, the investigation of which is Richard McMahon’s purpose in The Races of Europe.