Browse all reviews
The Politics of Biography in Africa: Borders, Margins, and Alternative Histories of Power / ed. Anaïs Angelo
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.
Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)united Kingdom / eds. Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Margaret M. Scull
Review Date: 11 March 2022
Four Nations Approaches, as the editors acknowledge from the start, follows in the footsteps of a very solid tradition of edited collections, brought about by the rise of ‘New British History’ in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Feminisms: A Global History / Lucy Delap
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.
What’s the point of history? / Daniel Woolf
Review Date: 06 November 2020
The sub-branch of history that is known by the ambiguous (and frightening to undergraduates, cats, and many mainstream academics) name “historiography” seems to be undergoing a Renaissance at the moment.
Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History / eds. Sally Holloway, Stephanie Downes, Sarah Randles
Review Date: 02 October 2019
Historians are good at putting objects in their place. Details about context, manufacture, use, abuse, meaning, significance, decay, and so on are layered so that an object itself becomes a carrier of its moment in history. Putting material back into the fabric of history itself enriches that history.
Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explanations / eds. Thomas Brudholm, Johannes Lang
Review Date: 15 August 2019
Never has the extraordinarily rich literature on mass atrocity seemed more relevant as ongoing reports from around the world remind us that we live in an age of genocide. This vast repertoire of scholarly work can appear at maximum capacity with countless overarching theoretical frameworks of mass violence.
Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing / Robert Caro
Review Date: 08 August 2019
Robert Caro’s new book, Working, is a sort of self-help manual for historians. Packed with thought-provoking insights and practical advice, it is sure to delight and inspire scholars, from eager students to consummate professionals, looking for a master class in history.
The Cult of Thomas Becket: History and Historiography through Eight Centuries / Kay Brainerd Slocum
Review Date: 31 January 2019
Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury (1120–70) is one of the iconic figures in British history – a man who most people have not only heard of, but also have an opinion on. Yet, despite the brutality of his murder, such opinions are not always positive. In fact, this medieval archbishop is an unusually divisive figure, and always has been.
Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive / Camilla Townsend
Review Date: 25 October 2018
It is difficult to believe now that generations of scholars in the 20th century argued with insistence that the indigenous cultures of the Americas were destroyed by European imperial expansion.
The Spectral Arctic: a Cultural History of Ghosts and Dreams in Polar Exploration / Shane McCorristine
Review Date: 06 September 2018
Last year’s prestigious AMC fictional drama The Terror traced the fate of John Franklin’s crew from the moment the famous expedition in search of the Northwest Passage grinded to a halt in the Arctic ice near King William Island, in 1846, to the disappearance of second-in-command Francis Crozier, years later.