Browse all reviews
Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain / Troy Bickham
Review Date: 26 February 2021
Within the past decade, much debate has ensued surrounding the question of whether or not food studies and culinary history constitute valid academic disciples. Detractors of these fields contend that in an age of food network channels and a proliferation of YouTube videos extoling the virtues of every possible ingredient, recipe, and technique—with or without historical support, food studies lack academic rigor.
A Promised Land / Barack Obama
Review Date: 12 February 2021
‘We are the Moses generation.’ Dr Otis Moss, a veteran of the civil rights movement, friend of Martin Luther King and former adviser to Jimmy Carter was addressing reassuring words to the latest aspirant for the presidency, the young Barack Obama. ‘We marched, we sat in, we went to jail … We got us out of Egypt, you could say.
Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe / Miri Rubin
Review Date: 05 February 2021
Cities and towns are places of movement and mingling, coming and going, settling down and moving on, and they always have been. The fluid dynamics of urban life have long fascinated artists and preoccupied people in power. The ‘London Lickpenny’, a poem about the London metropolitan region composed around 1400, captured this vivacity but also the risks, even dangers, that confronted a stranger travelling across London.
Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948 / Kevin Grant
Review Date: 29 January 2021
Historians of the British Empire have long recognized the hunger strike—famously embraced by suffragettes in Britain, and by nationalists in Ireland and India—as a transnational tactic of democratic, anti-colonial resistance. Kevin Grant’s thoroughly researched and conceptually sophisticated study confirms that ‘British transimperial network[s]’ were ‘critically important in the spread of hunger in protest around the world’ (p. 3).
Knowledge under attack / John R. Hodgson
Review Date: 22 January 2021
The burning of books is a highly emotive subject. The Nazis’ bonfires of Jewish books and other ‘degenerate’ literature in 1933 horrify, and not only because they presaged the incinerators of the Holocaust.
Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s / eds. Jill Pellew, Miles Taylor
Review Date: 08 January 2021
The most remarkable feature of the mould-breaking expansion of higher education that took place across the world in the 1960s was the foundation of some 200 entirely new universities.
AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines / eds. Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Sarah Dillon
Review Date: 11 December 2020
‘Artificial intelligence (AI)’ is a loaded term, rife with connotative contradiction that inspires debate, disagreement, and disillusion.
The War of Words: The Language of British Elections, 1880-1914 / Luke Blaxill
Review Date: 04 December 2020
Luke Blaxill’s book deserves to be seminal. Its unassuming title conceals a bracing methodological challenge: an argument for the application of specific digital techniques to the study of electoral politics. It deploys ‘corpus linguistics’—the computerised compilation and interrogation of massive databases of millions of words—to intervene in a series of debates about the language of the platform in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Department Stores and the Black Freedom movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s / Traci Parker
Review Date: 27 November 2020
Traci Parker’s book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s, is an engaging study of the intersections of race, class, gender, labour, and activism in an arguably quintessential 20th-century American space: the department store. Straddling the vast historiographies of civil rights and labour studies, Parker’s study deftly carves out its own place.
Statelessness: A Modern History / Mira L. Siegelberg
Review Date: 27 November 2020
Mira Siegelberg’s important monograph retrieves and explores the debates in a range of different forums on a subject of fundamental significance: how, in the author’s words, ‘the problem of statelessness informed theories of rights, sovereignty, international legal order, and cosmopolitan justice, theories developed when the conceptual and political contours of the modern interstate order were being worked out, against the background of some of the most…