Browse all reviews
Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour / Sarah Goldsmith
Review Date: 21 May 2021
Englishmen have always travelled. According to French Abbé Le Blanc, they travelled more than other people of Europe because `they look upon their isle as a sort of prison; and the first use they make of their liberty is to get out of it'.(1) For young elite males who travelled to France and Italy for up to five years, the Grand Tour was, most historians agree, ‘intended to provide the final education and polish’.
Animal City: The Domestication of America / Andrew A. Robichaud
Review Date: 13 November 2020
Late June 2020 was an extraordinary time to be reading Animal City. COVID-19, a zoonotic disease, had already killed around 130,000 people in the United States, with urban areas suffering the highest death rates. In New York City alone, 30,000 people had died.
Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England / Strother E. Roberts
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.
Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan / Susan C. Townsend, Simon Gunn
Review Date: 19 June 2020
In Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan, Simon Gunn and Susan Townsend have written the equivalent of three books.
Bibliography of the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’ / Major J. Selby Bradford, Lieut.- Colonel Ewan Butler
Review Date: 03 April 2020
It is possible to talk today of a ‘public obsession with the Second World War’.(1) The preoccupation is one that generates lively academic debate. Yet bizarre though it may now seem, in 1950—just five years after the surrender of Germany and Japan—it was possible to write off the Second World War as ‘already but a memory’.
Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area / Peter Cole
Review Date: 16 May 2019
In Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and San Francisco Bay Area, historian Peter Cole compares the union histories of two port cities, the militant struggles of dockworkers against racial discrimination, their response to technology (in the form of containerisation), and their solidarity actions with freedom struggles around the world.
The English Armada: the greatest naval disaster in English history / Luis Gorrochategui Santos
Review Date: 14 March 2019
Gorrochategui’s book is a revised and updated translation of the Spanish edition (Spanish Ministry of Defence, 2011). It sheds new light on an obscure, but fundamental, episode of the undeclared Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) that took place a year after the Spanish Armada. Interestingly, although Queen Elizabeth I was at first intentionally misinformed about this, once she knew the grim reality, she silenced it.
Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c.1500–1820 / Beverly Lemire
Review Date: 11 October 2018
In Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 movie Bend it like Beckham, the football-loving principal protagonist Jess Bhamra, daughter of Punjabi parents living in Hounslow, is upbraided by her mother for being too keen on sports to be able to make ‘aloo gobi’ properly, which gives this dish the appearance of being a key component in the repertoire of any suitably marriageable Punjabi girl at the start of the…
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.
Railways and The Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India / Christian Wolmar
Review Date: 31 May 2018
Christian Wolmar’s latest tome Railways and The Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India is a welcome addition to his existing repertoire of books on railways across the world. The volume offers an accessible account of the history of the railways of the Raj since the railway operations commenced in India in 1853.