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Review Date: 01 May 2024

From the 1920s-1940s, in America and Britain, many writers, artists, poets, musicians and other cultural workers were drawn to socially democratic artforms, influenced by Popular Front cultural aesthetics. The very broad group, which may have been ‘pro Communist’ politically and interested in diverse expressions of egalitarianism culturally, are frequently defined mainly in relationship to the 1930s, and to ideas about socially committed literature.

Review Date: 12 January 2024

Historians of the Cold War have long relished the incongruous image of the infamous July 1959 ‘Kitchen Debate’ that saw Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon debate the merits of their respective philosophies in a model American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokol’niki Park.

Review Date: 25 August 2023

Sometimes (not often enough) an academic book comes along that ticks all the boxes: it is based on thorough research, spanning archives on different continents, engaging with rich and varied source materials; it is held together by a tight set of themes; it is written in beautiful prose.

Review Date: 21 April 2023

Catherine Carstairs’s new history, The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality, explores the changes in oral healthcare in Canada from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including patient voices, Carstairs considers oral health history from a number of angles.

Review Date: 23 September 2022

Born in 1865 during the last years of the American Civil War, Carter H. Barnett was a teacher and the principal of Frederick Douglass School in Huntington, West Virginia, where he edited the West Virginia Spokesman and contributed to the state’s Black teacher association.

Review Date: 12 August 2022

The period 1910-40 was tumultuous in Mexican history. The armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) was followed by fragmented attempts by Revolutionary politicians to assert Federal control and modernisation in the face of military rebellion, resistance to social reform, two major religious revolts known as the Cristiada, and ongoing, albeit often unremarked, agency from Mexico’s indigenous populations.

Review Date: 30 April 2021

The indefinite article in the subtitle of Pekka Hämäläinen’s new book tells, to those familiar with the author’s first monograph and its professional impact, its own story. Ethnohistorians writing Native North American history in the later 20th century cast Indigenous Americans as heroic underdogs in a long, bitter struggle against Euro-American colonialism.

Review Date: 16 April 2021

In 2003, Max M. Edling published a field-changing book exploring the influence of European models of state-building on the framing and ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Edling termed this process, which took place in the late 1780s, ‘a revolution in favour of government’. (1) Christopher R.

Review Date: 16 April 2021

Recent social media campaigns have promoted #BuyBlack and #BuyIndigenous businesses, and corporations have been working to align themselves with these and other social justice movements in a bid to publicly perform their corporate social responsibility. Coffee companies have built global brands based on their fair-trade partnerships, and key players in the fashion industry have begun to re-think their role as ethical producers and consumers.

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.