Book Reviews

The presence of women in positions of power has consistently captivated individuals, and the reign of Eleanor of Aquitaine is a prime example of this phenomenon. Born in 1122, she was a prominent medieval queen who held power in both France...

The book opens with a summary of Ptolemaic history up to the ascension of Ptolemy III and a reasonable overview of the Ptolemaic Kingdom's constituent parts. This serves to establish the setting in which the book takes place, including Egypt...

In The Problem of Immigration, readers are introduced to a familiar historical struggle between the states and the federal government regarding matters of constitutional interpretation. Slave states in the antebellum period perceived a government...

I was intrigued by the title of Nancy Marie Brown’s latest book Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Help Save the Earth. In many ways, I am the ideal audience for this book: a history and anthropology enthusiast with limited...

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...

El Dorado, the legendary city of gold, is used as an allusion by H. W. Brands in his recent book to describe how 19th-century Americans viewed the land west of the Mississippi River. One could describe the history of the United States with...

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is a retelling of the life of Penelope, and the fate of the 12 maids from the Odyssey. In this contemporary tale, Atwood delves into the question of why were the twelve maids hanged and what led up to their...

Few English-language histories of the country and land of Georgia have been written. Donald Rayfield's Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia attempts to fill this gap. Rayfield is a scholar of Russian and Georgian literature, and while he...

In Ancient Mesopotamian Government and Geography, Laura la Bella attempts to offer a broad overview of ancient Mesopotamian government. Though, it is more an overview of Mesopotamian culture and practices that is framed by a distinction between...

Thomas L. Dynneson received his PhD in Education and Anthropology in 1972 from the University of Colorado. From his time as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, Dynneson primarily researched civism. As he describes it, civism “is a...