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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: 09 November 2023

Anaïs Angelo’s new edited collection, The Politics of Biography in Africa: Borders, Margins, and Alternative Histories of Power, explores themes within, and approaches to, writing and using biography in the pan-African context. It sits within an increasing amount of scholarship using biography as both method and mode of African history.

Review Date: 30 September 2023

The very first displays in Milk, a major Wellcome Collection exhibition, convey the strangeness of a food we all know well. Entitled 'the story of milk', the opening room sparks reflection on the oddness of the narratives and images imprinted on a deceptively simple part of our diet.

Review Date: 27 January 2023

Between 1834 and 1917, some 1.37 million Indian migrants travelled the length and breadth of the British Empire under contracts of indentureship.

Review Date: 04 November 2022

Writing in Macmillan’s Magazine a few years after the denouement of the Crimean War, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days, declared that this conflict’s ‘drama ... will never fail deeply to move the heart of England, at least until the grave has closed over our generation.

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: 04 June 2021

In recent decades historians, postcolonial theorists and feminist scholars have demonstrated how, in a variety of geographical settings, gendered stereotypes supported the conquest and domination of overseas territories by European colonial regimes.

Review Date: 09 April 2021

The historian Lucy Delap, author of The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century  (CUP, 2007), winner of the 2008 Women’s History Network Prize, has now published another book—Feminisms: A Global History (Penguin in the UK, and the University of Chicago Press in the US). This book, at nearly 400 pages, is a truly global history, dealing with 250 years of feminisms.

Review Date: 12 March 2021

All historical actors ultimately defy our neat labels. Practically speaking however, some are more defiant than others. One such figure is the dynamo ‘social entrepreneur’, Michael Young. (1) It has become a cliché to rattle off the dizzying array of institutions, projects and ideas with which Young was involved in his long and energetic career.

Review Date: 29 January 2021

Historians of the British Empire have long recognized the hunger strike—famously embraced by suffragettes in Britain, and by nationalists in Ireland and India—as a transnational tactic of democratic, anti-colonial resistance. Kevin Grant’s thoroughly researched and conceptually sophisticated study confirms that ‘British transimperial network[s]’ were ‘critically important in the spread of hunger in protest around the world’ (p. 3).