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Cotten Seiler, Associate Professor of American Studies at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has written a challenging and ambitious book that is designated to appeal to a range of scholars in Cultural Studies, Cultural and Historical Geography, American and Social History, Literature and Literary Criticism, Political and Social Theory and Sociology.

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).

This volume, dedicated to the historian Lawrence W. Levine, was, in the words of its authors, ‘born of our belief that the time is ripe for a broad assessment of U.S. cultural history’.

In early 1840, the New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong noted that the newspapers were obsessed with commentary and speculation about the upcoming wedding of Queen Victoria. All this was ‘doubtless very interesting and important to her Majesty’s loyal subjects’, wrote Strong huffily, but ‘to us republicans is, or ought to be, rather dull and profitless’ (p. 50).

The co-authors of this volume are David Haslam, the Chair and Clinical Director of the National Obesity Forum and Fiona Haslam, a former physician, art historian, and the author of a distinguished study of From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine and Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain.(1) This summarizes both the strength and the weakness of this comprehensive stud

Scholars continue to find new things to say about the Irish Diaspora. For many of them-especially those in Ireland and America-the term Diaspora, when applied to the Irish, has a deep, politicised meaning. We can see this point exemplified in two observations.

The bowels of university libraries are often cluttered with the remnants of past historical approaches. The Cambridge History of the British Empire (1929-59) is one such work.

The Will to Believe examines Woodrow Wilson’s national security strategy from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 to the end of his presidency, contrasting his ideas with alternative policies offered by his political rivals.

As the title of the book suggests, Geographies of Empire covers the period roughly from the beginning of the ‘scramble for Africa’ – following the British invasion of Egypt in 1882 – to the year by which many of the territories formerly acquired by European colonial powers had been lost or given up.

'From the Sea of Perpetual Gloom to the Holiday Cruise'