Browse all reviews
Migrant City: A New History of London / Panikos Panayi
Review Date: 30 June 2022
According to a survey carried out by the National Federation of Fish Fryers in the 1960s, the first fish and chip shop was opened by Joseph Malins in 1860 on Old Ford Road in the East End of London (p. 234).
Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe / Miri Rubin
Review Date: 05 February 2021
Cities and towns are places of movement and mingling, coming and going, settling down and moving on, and they always have been. The fluid dynamics of urban life have long fascinated artists and preoccupied people in power. The ‘London Lickpenny’, a poem about the London metropolitan region composed around 1400, captured this vivacity but also the risks, even dangers, that confronted a stranger travelling across London.
Department Stores and the Black Freedom movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s / Traci Parker
Review Date: 27 November 2020
Traci Parker’s book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s, is an engaging study of the intersections of race, class, gender, labour, and activism in an arguably quintessential 20th-century American space: the department store. Straddling the vast historiographies of civil rights and labour studies, Parker’s study deftly carves out its own place.
Animal City: The Domestication of America / Andrew A. Robichaud
Review Date: 13 November 2020
Late June 2020 was an extraordinary time to be reading Animal City. COVID-19, a zoonotic disease, had already killed around 130,000 people in the United States, with urban areas suffering the highest death rates. In New York City alone, 30,000 people had died.
Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society / Cécile Vidal
Review Date: 11 September 2020
In Caribbean New Orleans Cécile Vidal has brought together a prodigious volume and range of archival research in what is the most detailed social history of the city during the French period.
Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan / Susan C. Townsend, Simon Gunn
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.
On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore / Deborah R. Weiner, Eric L. Goldstein
Review Date: 01 May 2020
Much of the scholarship on American Jewry focuses on New York, the city that attracted the vast majority of Jewish immigrants. Yet a significant proportion of Jews settled in other cities, small towns, and even tiny outposts. Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R.
The Alien Jew in the British Imagination, 1881–1905: Space, Mobility and Territoriality / Hannah Ewence
Review Date: 01 May 2020
Research on immigration to Britain at the turn of the 20th century largely conforms to historiographical conventions which privilege the nation state as a framework for investigation and which adhere to narrative chronologies relevant to nations. These conventions, Ewence contends, eclipse much from view which does not easily fit into such established categories.
Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town / Guy Ortolano
Review Date: 13 February 2020
In 1979 Pete Wrong of the art collective and Punk band Crass was being interviewed by New Society about his graffiti operation on the London Underground: ‘We don’t just rip the posters down or spray them. We use stencils, neatly, to qualify them. Especially sexist posters, war posters and the sort of posters for sterile things like Milton Keynes.’ He spits those two words out.
Claiming the City: Protest, Crime, and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1860-1920 / Anindita Ghosh
Review Date: 30 January 2020
In the last couple of decades, there has been a resurgence in studying the history of South Asian urbanism with a wide range of monographs and articles being published.