This special issue, featuring reviews of books on the theme of domesticity and domestic living, coincides with the IHR’s 2018 Winter Conference: ‘Home: new histories of living’ (8-9 Feb 2018). The reviews of these 18 books appeared between 1999 and 2017. They provide historical studies of among other themes, architectural design, family life, housing policy, gender, possessions, neighbourliness, collective living, kitchens and domestic animals. Among the domestic experiences covered are those of early modern Holland, Georgian London, enlightenment Edinburgh, Weimar Munich, Soviet Moscow and post-war Harlem.
Harlem: the Unmaking of a Ghetto / Camilo José Vergara
Review Date: 12 January 2018
Harlem and the photograph share a long, closely entangled history. Photographic images of the riots that erupted in the neighbourhood in 1935 and 1943 helped to puncture the image of Harlem as a playground for white urban adventurers, and to raise in its place the spectre of a ‘no-go’ area, a district of Manhattan sealed off from direct encounter by whites.
Houses of Power: The Places the Shaped the Tudor World / Simon Thurley
Review Date: 11 November 2017
You may think you know the story of the Tudor dynasty and the steps they took in securing their power and legacy, but what most grand narratives of the Tudor monarchs do not describe is their intimate relationship with the built environment around them.
The Smoke of London / William Cavert
Review Date: 02 November 2017
In the 200 years before the invention of steam power and the advent of the Industrial Revolution, early modern London was a coal-fired metropolis. The dirty fuel was burnt in both the hearths of individual households and in the furnaces of breweries, bakers, and glassmakers.
The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 / Sara Pennell
Review Date: 19 October 2017
In contemporary understanding, a kitchen is a space which houses a heat source and appropriate utensils for preparing meals. How and why this kind of kitchen emerged in England between the 17th and mid-19th century is the story that Pennell set out to uncover.
Medieval Pets / Kathleen Walker-Meikle
Review Date: 02 May 2013
Kathleen Walker-Meikle’s book is a welcome addition to the increasing volume of research concerned with the roles animals played throughout history. This genuinely multidisciplinary subject has begun recently to attract attention, a sign that the intellectual market for animal-related topics is expanding among historians. One particular field, ‘human-animal studies’, is already strong in the USA and is growing in Europe as well.
Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space / Lynne Attwood
Review Date: 01 November 2010
The revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky famously proclaimed in his suicide note, ‘the love boat has crashed against byt.’ That the banal problems of everyday life (byt) had undermined the hopes of the Revolution has since been widely inferred in evaluations of the Soviet system.
Domestic Secrets: Women and Property in Sweden, 1600-1857 / Maria Ågren
Review Date: 01 October 2010
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels posited a fundamental relationship between women’s property rights, on the one hand, and changes in the social and political spheres, on the other.
The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship. Enterprise, Home and Household in London, c.1800-1870 / Alison Kay
Review Date: 01 June 2010
The Times in its editorial of 11 February 1857 opined 'It is a terrible incident of our social existence that the resources for gaining a livelihood left open to women are so few. ...
Behind Closed Doors. At Home in Georgian England / Amanda Vickery
Review Date: 30 April 2010
When historians of the future come to write about the historiographical preoccupations of 21st-century Britons, they surely will observe our growing obsession with consumer behaviour and material culture.
The Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers and Urban Culture / Peter Shapely
Review Date: 30 September 2009
For various reasons housing is important to everyone and thus it has rarely been far from the centre of political debate in Britain. As the main urban land use, housing is a valuable and scarce resource, and if politics are about command over resources then housing is inescapably a political issue.
