Best History Book Reviews

Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, penned by the retired art historian Jonathan Max Bloom from Boston College, offers a comprehensive exploration of the prominence of paper in Islamic history and its...

Each chapter of the book examines key developments in time and space across Medieval Europe, starting and ending in Ravenna, Italy. It covers: the late Western Roman Empire the Byzantine Empire, the Goths, Anglo-Saxon Britain...

The Silk Road may have carried the world’s most luxurious fabrics for trade, but it was paved with horses’ hooves. From the Bronze Age to the 20th century, the empires of China, Persia, India, and Mongolia conquered astride the backs of horses...

“Humsafar” is an Urdu word which means "companion." True to its name, this book acts as a friend to guide the audience through the complex world of Urdu poetry. Hitesh Gupta Aadil is an Urdu language and literature enthusiast and translator...

British author, Sophie Shorland, a former Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, takes a very friendly approach to describe the difficult life of King Charles II's Queen Consort, the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza. Shorland's audience...

From the outbreak of war in the 13 British North American colonies in 1775 to the conflicts that erupted throughout the Spanish New World colonies in the 1810s, revolutions convulsed the Atlantic World for half a century. The power and consequences...

In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, Virginia Postrel expertly demonstrates how the history of textiles is the story of human progress. Although textiles have shaped society in many ways, their central role in the development...

When first picking up this book, the reader might not expect to stumble upon police reports regarding wrongful arrests of Viennese women at the turn of the century. As a contemporary reader, what is provided on the pages of Katya Motyl’s...

Martha Rampton’s two primary goals with this book were to define in specific terms what “magic” meant and to examine how that meaning changed over time. She divides the book into four parts, with the last three focusing on specific time periods...

Twilight Cities: Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean is Katherine Pangonis’s second book, with her first being Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule (2021). Twilight Cities is dedicated to the history of five prominent and "lost"...