Leah Henrickson reviews an edited work that ‘triumphantly paves the way for future work in AI humanities’, exploring how we imagine intelligent machines, from The Odyssey’s self-sailing ships to cutting-edge AI.
Review Archives
The War of Words: The Language of British Elections, 1880-1914
‘The War of Words’ uses computational linguistics to ‘highlight unexpected patterns, and to open new interpretative doors’ on political speech in Victorian and Edwardian elections. Alex Middleton reviews this ‘ground-breaking study’.
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.
Statelessness: A Modern History
Peter Gatrell reviews ‘an admirable work of scholarship’ that challenges us to rethink ‘the very meaning of the modern state in relation to the human condition’.
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’.
Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy
As wages and prosperity increased in Victorian Britain, Emma Griffin finds evidence of families in desperate poverty. Jane Humphries asks: ‘Has Griffin uncovered a tsunami of male irresponsibility paradoxically set in motion by improving circumstances?’
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.”
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’.
What’s the point of history?
Why do we study the past, why should we, and how do we best go about it? Daniel Woolf takes us through ‘Why History?’,
“full of gems of insight”, and its more philosophical companion, ‘History and Morality’.
Nineteenth Century Spain: A New History
Dan Royle reviews a history that brings ‘clarity and interest to this neglected period’.