Hannah Holtschneider reviews a compelling exploration of changing ideas about race, of human relationships in colonial empires, of Jewish minorities in slave societies, of religious identity and belonging, and of migration across the Anglophone Atlantic from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.
History Type Archives
Listening to the Language of the People
Cities of the Plain Cities of the Plain—not the ones in the Book of Genesis, but those scattered across Wallachia, between the southern Carpathians and the lower Danube. For most of the medieval and early modern periods, this territory was a borderland between Christian and Ottoman Europe. There had been many palisade towns and stagingContinue reading “Listening to the Language of the People”
Migrant City: A New History of London
Jean P. Smith reviews this exploration of the myriad ways that migrants have contributed to the making of London, finding it a substantial achievement of broad historical relevance.
The Press and the People: Cheap Print and Society in Scotland, 1500-1785
Laura Stewart reviews this first full-length study of cheap print in early modern Scotland, finding that it opens ‘rich new seams of material’, expanding our ‘understanding of Scottish society and culture in the pre-modern age’.
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
David A. Nichols reviews this ‘deeply researched and insightful’ study of ‘an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations’.
Department Stores and the Black Freedom movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s
Katherine Ballantyne reviews a ‘thought-provoking’ look at the role of consumerism in the American Black Freedom Movement.
Disability in industrial Britain: A cultural and literary history of impairment in the coal industry, 1880-1948
Ewan Gibbs explores this ‘highly original’ study of why ‘disability should be understood as a central animating feature of coalfield societies in England, Scotland, and Wales’.
Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity in the Fourteenth Century
Matt Raven reads this ‘wide-ranging and richly researched portrait of life in fourteenth-century Cornwall which takes as ‘connectivity’ as its theme’.
Animal City: The Domestication of America
Thomas Almeroth-Williams reviews an “insightful study” which, in 2020, is “all the more powerful in the wake of events which expose myriad failings of government, regulation, public health, policing and justice; the far-reaching effects of social inequality; and alarming global developments in human–animal relations.”
Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society
Matthew Stallard reviews this “defining and comprehensive” microhistory of French New Orleans and its links to the Caribbean.