Browse all reviews

Review Date: 24 July 2020

Covid-19 has fuelled widespread panic across the world. Every day there are new cases of infected people and deaths. We became accustomed to seeing crowds of people emptying stores from all necessary provisions. In most discussions, there are constant references to various forms of panic surrounding Covid-19. Headlines such as “Do not panic,” “Remain calm,” “Be smart but don’t panic” became ubiquitous.

Review Date: 17 July 2020

The case of Mary Toft—the woman who gave birth to rabbits in 1726—has an enduring appeal. I remember the first time I encountered her as a final year undergraduate, both fascinated and appalled by the details of the case.

Review Date: 17 July 2020

Jonathan Scott, Professor of History at the University of Auckland, in his recent book, How the Old World Ended (2019), has provided an intellectual bridge between the early modern period and the modern world, which was born out of the Industrial Revolution.

Review Date: 10 July 2020

John J. Navin offers a new account of the first half century of settlement in the colony of South Carolina, which he characterizes as The Grim Years. By the mid-18th century South Carolina would become the wealthiest British colony in mainland North America, but in recent years scholars long familiar with its distinctive plantation system have turned more attention to these earlier, formative decades.

Review Date: 10 July 2020

Environmental history is one of the most dynamic, innovative, and though-provoking areas of current academic enquiry, and the connection between environmental change, imperialism, and expanding global economies has recently received increased scholarly attention.[1] Building on the foundational works of historians such as William Cronon, Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy explores the intricate relationships between ecological change and economic expansion in the early modern British-Atlantic.

Review Date: 03 July 2020

How did the world of nation-states come about? What happened to the world of empires that preceded it? How did the transition take place and how inevitable was it? These may seem (and indeed are) old questions.

Review Date: 03 July 2020

Democracy was under siege during the 1970s. Terrorism, civil disobedience, and political instability were widespread, even in Western Europe. Elsewhere, dictatorships held sway and military intervention was a regular occurrence in many regions. A democratically elected left wing government was overthrown in Chile in 1973, with the active support of the United States. This environment changed dramatically during the 1980s.

Review Date: 26 June 2020

Scholarly historians as a group are often criticized for writing books that speak only to other academics and that are not accessible to a general audience. This criticism is unfair, as many professional historians who have made significant interventions in our understanding of history have also written books that bring history alive for the average reader. W.

Review Date: 19 June 2020

A lack of institutional documentation has rendered it difficult for scholars of early modernity to reconstruct the significance of apostasy from Judaism before the Council of Trent (1545-1563). As such, the reasons behind the conversion of Jews to Catholicism, especially in Renaissance Italy, remain understudied to this day.Tamar Herzig’s A Convert’s Tale offers a crucial contribution in this sense.

Review Date: 19 June 2020

In Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan, Simon Gunn and Susan Townsend have written the equivalent of three books.