Book Reviews

“Why should a distant island beyond the north-western edge of the Roman Empire have become the target of Roman ambitions for conquest?" (1). With this question, historian Richard Hingley encourages us to contemplate the answer in considerably...

Ian Worthington’s Athens After Empire: A History from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Hadrian shows how there has been a tendency to fixate on the heyday of famous ancient cities while the events before or after have been unfairly and...

In 1995, Colin Wells published the second edition of his 1984 book, The Roman Empire, with the express goals of including newer theories, updating the "Suggestions for Further Reading" section, and correcting various editorial mistakes. The...

From the outset, Ann Oakley’s Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880-1920 sets an ambitious goal of recovering the memory of the female reformers active during these years who made important contributions to...

In his introduction to The Essential Greek Historians, an important distinction is made by the editor Stanley M. Burstein: what follows in this book is not "history" but "historiography." History is made up of events and consequences, an...

Globalization is a current buzzword in business, communications, and politics, especially in this early part of the 21st century. Traditional American historical interpretations focus on the post-World War II era of the 1950s and 1960s as...

Empire of Salons came from Helen Pfeifer's PhD thesis, which she completed at Princeton University, thus this book is largely targeted to the academic audience, both lecturers and students. It, however, has a concise and organized structure...

Some people like to believe that the Ottoman Empire was Europe’s ultimate “other.” Several European nations, not least the Serbs and the Hungarians, consider themselves those who held the Ottomans at bay. Some still consider the two sieges...

Writing a biography of Dante Alighieri is not an easy task even for the most talented historians. In narrating the life of the great Florentine poet, universally considered the initiator of Italian literature, scholars often excessively focus...

Strategos: Born in the Borderlands, by Gordon Doherty, is a novel following the incredible exploits of Apion, a Byzantine boy living among Seljuk farmers in the lawless area at the edge of Byzantium in the 1040’s CE. Set in Anatolia (modern-day...