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It seems that politicians and politics have never been regarded with greater contempt across the western world.

Confederate Reckoning is a ‘political history of the unfranchised’ (p. 7). It joins a significant body of scholarship that has sought to expand the category of ‘the political’ by taking into account the behaviour and ideas of those who, in formal terms, were excluded from politics.

It is rare to review a book that was published nearly 60 years ago. It is also a privilege, because Sir George Hill’s last volume in his four-volume A History of Cyprus is considered by most historians of Cyprus as the starting point for both students and scholars of the Ottoman and British periods (until 1948) of Cyprus’ past.

The War of 1812 has the unfortunate fate of being wedged between two of the most greatly studied events of modern world history, the American Revolution and Civil War. Indeed, the looming bicentennial of the 1812 conflict promises to be overshadowed by year two of the Civil War sesquicentennial.

Paul Mulvey’s study of the radical MP Josiah C. Wedgwood is a labour of love. Beginning as a doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics, this book has been many years in the making.

Wasteland with Words is a very welcome addition to the small number of academic books about Iceland’s modern history available in English. The few other works on modern Icelandic history are largely written in Icelandic for local consumption.

James Dickerson should be commended for tracing the theme of American concentration camps through from the 17th to the 21st century. It is all too easy to slip into the comfortable approach of examining events in isolation, when they are in fact but one more example of how a nation has failed to learn from the mistakes of its past.

This is an unusual book in terms of the range of its discrete and varied chapters. Its strongest continuing themes are ecology and the Sundarbans. Despite an occasional lack of context and connection, each section is of interest, and some are original and thought-provoking.

‘International, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary’ (p. xv) is how Porterfield positions this ambitious collection which analyses caricature between 1759 and 1838. A product of a conference of the same name, the essays it contains fulfil this remit admirably whilst attempting to explain the rise of caricature.

The activities of W. P. Roberts, the 19th-century ‘miners’ attorney-general’, has long been a subject of great interest to labour historians. His significance for the history of British trade unionism was perhaps most clearly highlighted first in Raymond Challinor and Brian Ripley’s history of the Miners’ Association, published in 1968, and then Dr.