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Book Review
The Currency of Empire: Money and Power in Seventeenth-Century English America
Jonathan Barth argues that England expanded its empire overseas throughout the 1600s in order to collect precious metals and wealth. Barth’s thesis is that colonists tolerated economic subordination to England as long as they had political...
Book Review
Gentry Rhetoric: Literacies, Letters, and Writing in an Elizabethan Community
European rhetoric and language usage have experienced many changes and modifications ever since ancient Greece and Roman orator Cicero's famous diction. Language, in history, has been used not just for functional communication but also as...
Book Review
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
As the title suggests, Caroline Elkins's book tells the history of what historians call the “second British Empire” - the imperial developments that took shape after the disastrous loss of the rebellious American colonies in 1783 - through...
Book Review
Information: A Historical Companion
The internet only changes how people process information instead of creating the idea of 'information.' As soon as humans developed writing around 3400 BCE, we found many ways to record information from tax records to poetry and from legal...
Book Review
The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea
In the book's Introduction, Edward Watts sets out his premise clearly. Roman politicians grew their power by destabilizing the present conditions of their society. As Watts points out, when trying to restore Rome, politicians often violated...
Book Review
Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia
When I first saw the title of this book, I was excited to read it. Many studies on the Silk Road focus on its eastern end in China or its southern sections in the Middle East, but few scholars have looked at the relationship between Central...
Book Review
Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
The story of the Mughal Empire is a fascinating one. It has most of the historical elements that one might expect out of an empire: powerful male rulers, wars of succession, magnificent buildings, conflicts between religious and non-religious...
Book Review
Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse
Although it was published in 1995, Richard R. John's Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse remains a must-read in the media history academia. This book practically shaped today's academic research in this genre...
Book Review
Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England
There are many books, both scholarly and popular, that discuss one of the most seminal events in English history: the Norman Conquest of 1066. Perspectives of the Anglo-Saxons, the French, the Normans, and the various populations living in...
Book Review
Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
Every culture, religion, and community has its narrative of how this world originated. This narrative tells the people in that community why our landscapes look the way they are, why we have different seasons, why the sky rains, and, more...