Search
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/cook_2.jpg?itok=VN-W1tq2)
When I was a fourth grade student in suburban Birmingham, Alabama in the 1970s, the history curriculum was devoted to a study of our state. Our teacher, Mrs. Lawson, supplemented our textbook with personal recollections of the Civil War gleaned from her own grandmother, who had been a girl in the 1860s. Mrs.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/brown_3.jpg?itok=k-kQ2CWe)
With the obvious exception of Pitt the Younger, the offspring of British prime ministers who have followed their fathers into politics have at best been pale shadows of their father. Admittedly, by my reckoning nine of them since the 1832 Great Reform Act have achieved cabinet rank, but none have seemed like potential prime ministers.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Asaka.jpg?itok=9tWTuO2b)
Ikuko Asaka opens this ambitious book by referencing the climatic and geographic rebuttal of black journalist and abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/provence.jpg?itok=b-uZ_M5x)
It was more than 30 years ago when Albert Hourani pointed to the common Ottoman lineages of the Arab political elite active in the inter-war Middle East. ‘They had been at school together in Istanbul’, he noted.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/carre.jpg?itok=_eDcFMJa)
In an age where the welfare state, the social jewel in Britain's post-war crown, seems to be at breaking point, Jacques Carré's latest book, La prison des pauvres : l'expérience des workhouses en Angleterre (The Pauper's Prison: The Experience of Workhouses in England), is a timely reminder that public welfare in Britain has a long and complicated history.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/wolmar.jpeg?itok=iJcENhFW)
Christian Wolmar’s latest tome Railways and The Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India is a welcome addition to his existing repertoire of books on railways across the world. The volume offers an accessible account of the history of the railways of the Raj since the railway operations commenced in India in 1853.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/mexican.jpg?itok=pvNFj3DH)
It is an ambitious book that would try to cover the Conquest of Mexico, the rise and fall of the country’s hacienda system, the emergence of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the intricacies of Emiliano Zapata’s role in the Mexican Revolution, and the exodus of women from rural regions in the mid-1960s to look for work as ‘household help’ in the nation’s fast-growing capital city.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Readman.jpg?itok=K_kTHd4E)
This impressively researched and finely written study is an ambitious attempt to use the history of specific regions and localities to explore wider themes of national identity and attitudes to landscape and the environment across the long 19th century, from around 1780 to 1914.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/easternencounters.png?itok=5LBWKOOZ)
Some 70 years after the British left India it is timely to look back at how the kings and queens of the United Kingdom came to amass one of the largest private collections of South Asian art in the world. Two conjoined exhibitions currently showing at the Queen’s Gallery do just that.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/jews_of_batimore.jpg?itok=GZhgABSV)
Much of the scholarship on American Jewry focuses on New York, the city that attracted the vast majority of Jewish immigrants. Yet a significant proportion of Jews settled in other cities, small towns, and even tiny outposts. Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R.