Search
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/shanzerd.jpg?itok=l3VrIY3_)
When one is sent such an item to review one inevitably speculates why. Is one a known purveyor of hot air? Or just vulgar and unshockable?(1) Is one being set up for Max Reger’s response to a music critic? 'Ich sitze in dem kleinsten Zimmer in meinem Hause. Ich habe ihre Kritik vor mir.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/guyattn.jpg?itok=pAH2cGU7)
Now that the dust has settled on the presidential race, it’s easier to assess Simon Schama’s ambitious project of last autumn: The American Future: A History. The book (and the accompanying television series) departs from his previous work in several ways.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/joness.jpg?itok=rR5bTia0)
Beatrice Webb wrote in her first volume of autobiography, My Apprenticeship, that the age in which she grew up was dominated by two ‘idols of the mind’, namely a belief in scientific method and ‘the consciousness of a new motive; the transference of the emotion of self-sacrificing service from God to man’ (quoted p. 249). Auguste Comte was the prophet of both of these idols.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/robertsh.jpg?itok=nZu17vt0)
This work of literary criticism is inevitably aimed more at people working in French departments than at social or intellectual historians. Despite the interdisciplinary potential of the subject-matter, there is little here of direct interest to the latter, hence this review is addressed primarily to the former.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/vlassopoulosk.jpg?itok=u_z9nE6l)
This is a very interesting volume, which aims to bring together the variety of contexts and genres in which ancient history was employed and studied during the Enlightenment.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/allchind.jpg?itok=qS3W2U5Y)
The first principle of understanding history, I was taught, is to sympathize with the historical actors, to immerse oneself in their context and perspective.(1) Otherwise, history becomes a fabricated reconstruction – more about the writer's ideology than the events of the past.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/mortimers.jpg?itok=O5qCEN9H)
The subject of Glenn Burgess’ new book is an exciting one, and its author is well qualified to tackle it. Political thought is a lively and flourishing field within history, and Glenn Burgess has done much to promote it.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/carrr.jpg?itok=KWSKHa-A)
The history of the Enlightenment can sometimes appear as a male narrative, dominated by canonical male writers, with women appearing only as subjects denied an equality of rationality and relegated to a feminine domesticity.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/daviesm.jpg?itok=n0BVol9y)
‘We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong’: Gregory Bateson’s observation summarizes what motivates Keith Jenkins’s latest book.(1) In this collection of essays written and published over the last 15 years (including not only a foreword by Hayden White and an afterword by Alun Munslow, but also responses from Perez Zagorin and Michael C.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/sherwoodm.jpg?itok=ujam_TNg)
This excellent book is about some of the writers – mainly those living in Europe from the 1930s till the 1960s – whose writings were either wholly or partly about the ‘ending of British rule in Africa’. The main writer dealt with is George Padmore; the others are Jomo Kenyatta (while he lived in the UK), C. L. R. James, Peter Abrahams, Ras T.