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What’s the point of history? / Daniel Woolf

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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.


Women before the court: Law and patriarchy in the Anglo-American world, 1600–1800 / Lindsay R. Moore

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Review Date: 25 September 2020

Lindsay R. Moore’s Women Before the Court is an important contribution to the growing body of research on premodern women’s access to justice that has been published over the past decade.(1) Recent debates have sought to complicate the limitations of the English common law doctrine of coverture which, at least in theory, prevented married women’s independent access to justice.


How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800 / Jonathan Scott

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Review Date: 17 July 2020

Jonathan Scott, Professor of History at the University of Auckland, in his recent book, How the Old World Ended (2019), has provided an intellectual bridge between the early modern period and the modern world, which was born out of the Industrial Revolution.


Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England / Strother E. Roberts

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Review Date: 10 July 2020

Environmental history is one of the most dynamic, innovative, and though-provoking areas of current academic enquiry, and the connection between environmental change, imperialism, and expanding global economies has recently received increased scholarly attention.[1] Building on the foundational works of historians such as William Cronon, Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy explores the intricate relationships between ecological change and economic expansion in the early modern British-Atlantic.


The Grim Years: Settling South Carolina, 1670–1720 /

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Review Date: 10 July 2020

John J. Navin offers a new account of the first half century of settlement in the colony of South Carolina, which he characterizes as The Grim Years. By the mid-18th century South Carolina would become the wealthiest British colony in mainland North America, but in recent years scholars long familiar with its distinctive plantation system have turned more attention to these earlier, formative decades.


Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England / eds. Joanne Begiato, Adrian Green, Michael Lobban

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Review Date: 09 January 2020

There is no more exemplary figurehead for the history of legal culture than the late Christopher W. Brooks. As the editors of this volume observe, by the time of his death in 2014 Brooks ‘had established a firm reputation as the most important and influential historian of law and society in early modern England’ (p. 1).


When Rape Was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence During Slavery / Rachel A Feinstein

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Review Date: 17 October 2019

In this concise monograph, Rachel Feinstein explores the centrality of sexual violence against enslaved women in the formation of white gendered identities. Using a variety of theoretical lenses, including intersectionality and systemic racism theory, Feinstein places racist sexual violence into its broader context, tracing the legacies of such violence in today’s behaviour and discourse.


The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500-2000 / John Tutino

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Review Date: 14 March 2019

It is an ambitious book that would try to cover the Conquest of Mexico, the rise and fall of the country’s hacienda system, the emergence of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the intricacies of Emiliano Zapata’s role in the Mexican Revolution, and the exodus of women from rural regions in the mid-1960s to look for work as ‘household help’ in the nation’s fast-growing capital city.


Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive / Camilla Townsend

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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.


Jacobitism and Anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World, 1688-1727 / David Parrish

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Review Date: 31 May 2018

Many years ago, J. H. Overton drew a fine line between Non-Jurors on the one hand and Jacobites on the other. The former, according to Overton, were ‘in no active sense of the term Jacobites’ because they were ‘content to live peacefully and quietly without a thought of disturbing the present government’.