Browse all reviews
Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multi-Racial Jewish Family / Laura Arnold Leibman
Review Date: 25 August 2023
Sometimes (not often enough) an academic book comes along that ticks all the boxes: it is based on thorough research, spanning archives on different continents, engaging with rich and varied source materials; it is held together by a tight set of themes; it is written in beautiful prose.
Listening to the Language of the People / Natalie Zemon Davis
Review Date: 05 April 2023
Cities of the Plain Cities of the Plain—not the ones in the Book of Genesis, but those scattered across Wallachia, between the southern Carpathians and the lower Danube. For most of the medieval and early modern periods, this territory was a borderland between Christian and Ottoman Europe.
Migrant City: A New History of London / Panikos Panayi
Review Date: 30 June 2022
According to a survey carried out by the National Federation of Fish Fryers in the 1960s, the first fish and chip shop was opened by Joseph Malins in 1860 on Old Ford Road in the East End of London (p. 234).
The Press and the People: Cheap Print and Society in Scotland, 1500-1785 / Adam Fox
Review Date: 25 March 2022
Early modern Scotland was awash with cheap print. Adam Fox, in the first dedicated study of the phenomenon in Scotland, gives readers some startling figures. Andro Hart, one of Edinburgh’s leading booksellers, died in 1622. In his possession, according to his inventory, were 42,300 unbound copies of English books printed on his own presses.
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power / Pekka Hämäläinen
Review Date: 30 April 2021
The indefinite article in the subtitle of Pekka Hämäläinen’s new book tells, to those familiar with the author’s first monograph and its professional impact, its own story. Ethnohistorians writing Native North American history in the later 20th century cast Indigenous Americans as heroic underdogs in a long, bitter struggle against Euro-American colonialism.
Department Stores and the Black Freedom movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s / Traci Parker
Review Date: 27 November 2020
Traci Parker’s book, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s, is an engaging study of the intersections of race, class, gender, labour, and activism in an arguably quintessential 20th-century American space: the department store. Straddling the vast historiographies of civil rights and labour studies, Parker’s study deftly carves out its own place.
Disability in industrial Britain: A cultural and literary history of impairment in the coal industry, 1880-1948 / Alexandra Jones, Mike Mantin, Steven Thompson, Kirsti Bohata
Review Date: 20 November 2020
Danger, disaster and the loss of life are emblematic features of Britain’s cultural memory of coal mining. Netflix’s hit series, The Crown, prominently reinforced these motifs through its recent portrayal of the 1966 Aberfan disaster in South Wales.
Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity in the Fourteenth Century / S.J. Drake
Review Date: 13 November 2020
It has now been over half a century since a generation of historians were inspired to study the workings of local society in late medieval England by the teaching and work of K.B. McFarlane, who died in 1966.
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.
Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society / Cécile Vidal
Review Date: 11 September 2020
In Caribbean New Orleans Cécile Vidal has brought together a prodigious volume and range of archival research in what is the most detailed social history of the city during the French period.