Book Reviews

At the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in October 2020, Brown University hosted the Pandemics and Plagues in Antiquity webinar lecture series. Kyle Harper, Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma, hosted the first session. The...

From the Stone Age, hunting had certain functional purposes to bringing food for one's community. The adrenaline and excitement that hunting provides continue to attract people in the modern world to this antique technique. In Hunting: A...

“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...

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...

Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 represents a paradigm shift in the study of Indian history. It debunks the stereotypical interpretation of the middle period of Indian history, first championed by the British and later...

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...

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...

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...

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...