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At the centre of this rich, provocative book is a body of water and a steampunk contraption. In the 19th century, the Mississippi River loomed large in the American imagination; a waterway of immense power and possibility which sliced through the North American continent.

In 1985, the late Thomas K. McCraw won the Pulitzer Prize in History for his joint profile of pioneers of American economic regulation in Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E.

Sasha and Emma is the story of one life-long relationship and the product of another. When the historian of Russian and American anarchism Paul Avrich died in 2006, he left behind a rich body of scholarly work (1) and an unfinished manuscript exploring ‘the passionate half-century friendship between legendary activist Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman’ (p.

The past year has seen an embarrassment of riches for those interested in the history of slavery and abolition.

This is an updated version (December 2014) of a piece originally published in 2013, which extends the coverage of the review to include some more recent works on 1812.

Over the last three decades, histories of popular politics in Latin America have proliferated. It is not hard to understand why. Elections and liberalism loomed large in the present, and so their history began to assume more importance. Larger trends in the discipline reinforced the shift, as historians tipped the interpretive scales away from socio-economic structures and towards agency.

Buried deep within the endnotes of Joseph Eaton’s book is a wry comment on the art of reviewing by the 19th-century author Sydney Smith, ‘I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so’ (p. 199, n. 32).

Paul A. Gilje, Professor of United States History at the University of Oklahoma and renowned expert on the history of common people on the waterfront in early America (1), argues in his recently published book on the War of 1812 that the U.S. declared war against Great Britain in 1812 in defense of neutral rights and the safety of American sailors.

In An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States, Eric R. Schlereth traces connections between arguments over belief and the new American nation’s partisanship, print culture, and civil society.

Slavery defined the Atlantic world. African forced labour produced the primary materials that drove European mercantile economies. The plantation complex lay at the core of societies from Brazil and the West Indies to the American mainland and West Africa.