Browse all reviews
Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching / Jarvis R. Givens
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.
The Crisis of the Meritocracy / Peter Mandler
Review Date: 11 March 2022
Britain has never been a meritocracy. Despite the concept’s widely-evoked vision of a ‘fair’ or ‘just’ social order, one where individuals rise or fall according to their ‘talents’ or ‘efforts’, the rise of the meritocracy has continually been scuppered by the perseverance of inherited privilege or democratic pressure.
Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s / eds. Jill Pellew, Miles Taylor
Review Date: 08 January 2021
The most remarkable feature of the mould-breaking expansion of higher education that took place across the world in the 1960s was the foundation of some 200 entirely new universities.
Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire / Tom Rice
Review Date: 02 October 2020
Tom Rice’s book offers an extensive and cogent history of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) from its early conception in the minds of bureaucrats and educational specialists to its dissolution following the wave of independence movements in the mid-20th century.
Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore / Karen M. Teoh
Review Date: 03 October 2019
In 1899 the Straits Chinese physician and community leader Lim Boon Keng made the case that female education was beneficial to the community as a whole: ‘Keep your women in a low, ignorant and servile state, and in time you will become a low, ignorant and servile people – male and female!’ (p. 69).
Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century / Molly Ladd-Taylor
Review Date: 27 September 2018
The history of eugenics continues to provide new and challenging ways to interpret the some of the major developments in social policy and social work during the 20th century, from child welfare, public health, and family planning, to the institutionalisation of disabled persons and the treatment of mentally ill.
Review Article – Displaced Children in the Aftermath of the Second World War / Antoine Burgard
Review Date: 06 September 2018
The relief and resettlement of Europe’s unaccompanied and displaced children in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War has recently received considerable scholarly scrutiny. The two books reviewed here, while different in scope and methodology, are both welcome additions to the growing literature on the topic.
Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge, 1535-1584 / Ceri Law
Review Date: 06 September 2018
Virtually every major male figure involved in England’s reformations was a product of one of England’s two universities, and biographers rightly recognise the importance of understanding people’s careers at Oxford and Cambridge to their later lives. Yet the institutional history of the universities themselves, especially Cambridge, has been neglected. Ceri Law’s Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge corrects that oversight.
Ark of Civilization: Refugee Scholars and Oxford University, 1930-1945 / Jas Elsner, Katharina Ulmschneider, Sally Crawford
Review Date: 17 May 2018
We are all familiar with modern debates in the media regarding the politics of refugee rescue and arguments surrounding which immigrants should be prioritised for rescue and aid.
The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East / Michael Provence
Review Date: 05 April 2018
It was more than 30 years ago when Albert Hourani pointed to the common Ottoman lineages of the Arab political elite active in the inter-war Middle East. ‘They had been at school together in Istanbul’, he noted.