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Brian Bond’s newest book presents an analysis of Western Front memoirs written by British and Commonwealth authors, acting as an analogous volume to The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History.(1) The study is organised into a series of essays discussing individual authors, which are in turn complemented by comparative thematic chapters
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It is said that ‘efficiency is doing better what is already being done’, although the word in English derives from the Latin efficere; simply, to accomplish. In its crudest sense then, regardless of culture or nationality, the vast majority of humanity engages in efficiency at a personal level on a daily basis.
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Fergus Campbell’s book explores the relationship between agrarian conflict and nationalist politics in the period from 1891 to 1921. Although the study focuses primarily on the five counties of Connaught, with a particular emphasis on east Galway and especially the Craughwell area, provincial and local events are located in a national context.
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Given that the growth in the cultural prominence of the young was one of the most remarkable features of western society in the 20th century, serious historical studies of youth culture do not come along as often as they should. For this reason I was very pleased to be asked to review David Fowler’s new book, which contains much original archive research.
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In Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after the Civil War, Scott Giltner delivers an intriguing and thoughtful survey of sporting cultures and racial identity in the postbellum South. The study, which, as the author notes, evolved from ‘masters proposal to dissertation to book’ (p.
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Georgine Clarsen has produced a fascinating account of women motorists in the first three decades of the automobile age. Her crisp and elegant prose takes the reader on a speedy trip over a wide range of terrain, indicating the importance of the car in the cultural politics of the early 20th century.
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As we approach the 20th anniversary of the seizure of power by the current Ethiopian government – the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) – a government which has shown itself ever more determined to monopolise power indefinitely, it is increasingly apposite to examine the roots of political modernity in Ethiopia.
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In Our Friend ‘The Enemy’ Thomas Weber attacks both the Sonderweg-interpretation of the German Kaiserreich and theories of British exceptionalism before 1914.
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Until recently, the mixed economies of the welfare state in general and of social insurance in particular were a neglected issue in social and economic history. The historiography of the welfare state concentrated mainly on the public side of social policies, namely on the development of social insurance, neglecting the parallel worlds of commercial and mutual insurance.
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This is an ambitious and weighty study of prisons, prison labour and penology from the early Republican period through the Depression years which McLennan argues has been characterised by ‘a long continuum of episodic instability, conflict, and political crisis’ (p. 2).