Contending Visions of the Lone Star State: Debating Texas’ Identity

danny.millum — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:35:52 +0000

Texas is in the midst of an identity crisis. Some historians, such as Walter Buenger in Path to a Modern South, argue that Texas has a strong connection to the South. Others, like Glen Ely in his new book Where the West Begins, contend that Texas – especially West Texas – is closely linked to the American West. Moreover, some historians believe that Texas is unique and defies historical categorization, echoing back to Texas’ days as a Republic.

Tejanos and the American Dream

danny.millum — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:08:54 +0000

Historians have not been kind to Tejanos—at least until the present generation. Many have marginalized or maligned them to diminish their importance in Texas history, or to rewrite Texas history to emphasize Anglo achievements. Andrés Tijerina, in Tejano Empire: Life on the South Texas Ranchos (Clayton Wheat Williams Texas Life Series), brings Tejano culture and values to life for modern readers who may be oblivious to their existence and their importance in Texas and Tejano history.

Debating the Cultural Revolution in China

danny.millum — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:18:15 +0000

In Western imaginations, the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76) – in which one of the world’s oldest, most elaborate cultures began destroying itself, in which a successful, disciplined political organisation tore its own heart out, and in which colleagues and classmates turned murderously on each other – stands among the landmarks of the recent Chinese past.

Moscow as city and metaphor

danny.millum — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:52:47 +0000

Penelope Fitzgerald’s historical novel The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913 but written at the height of perestroika, conveys an ambivalence familiar to those of us who spent time there during the Gorbachev years. Much in the Moscow she describes is grimy and discouraging: the oppressive bureaucracy; the ugly, derelict buildings; and, for much of the year, the gray, wet, depressing weather.

Nun’s (not) on the run

danny.millum — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:22:36 +0000

The challenge in writing a comparative review of Kate Lowe’s fine study of early modern Italian convents Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture with Sarah Dunant’s gripping novel Sacred Hearts is to find ways of making sense of the experience of reading both beyond stating the obvious. They are both about the religious life of women in a particular time (early modern) and in one country (Italy).

Restoration: fact and fiction in the stores of history

danny.millum — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:38:24 +0000

Sir Walter Scott, masquerading both as ‘The Author’, as well as his pompous alter-ego, the historian ‘Dr Jonas Dryasdust’, inserted the following dialogue into the beginning of his historical novel of the Restoration period, Peveril of the Peak (1823):

‘Author…you mean to say these learned persons [historians] will have but little toleration for a romance, or a fictious narrative, founded upon history?

The many lives of John Bale

danny.millum — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:36:11 +0000

For those historians who have studied the English Reformation or the writing of polemics, histories and plays in the 16th century the name John Bale (1495–1563) appears high on the list of English scholars supporting a reformist agenda. Bale popularised the genre of martyrology for an English audience, later taken to its logical conclusion in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

Telling ghost stories

danny.millum — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:04:16 +0000

Pompeii is the quintessential ghost story, frequently told by archaeological and literary scribes working together in symbiosis, not always for the good. In this multitude of ghost raconteurs novelist Robert Harris stands tall. With scientific aid and comfort from two of the world’s foremost British Pompeianists, archaeologist Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and classicist Mary Beard, both of Cambridge, Harris wrote the novel Pompeii, published by Random House in 2003. Its enormous popular success brings further rewards, for director Paul W. S.

Shell-shocked: trauma, the emotions and the First World War

danny.millum — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:06:52 +0000

I was 16 or 17 when I first read Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, and 26 when I completed my PhD on shell shock in First World War Britain. It would be doing more than one of my university lecturers, as well as Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, a disservice to say that I ended up working on shell shock just because I liked Regeneration – but my career would almost certainly have developed along different lines had I not read the book.

Flyers and their traumas: the RAF in the Second World War

danny.millum — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:13:55 +0000

One would naturally expect the two books under review, one a history published by an academic press and the other a novel, to be very different treatments of their chosen theme. Yet it is the similarities between them that consistently strike the reader. They are both concerned with airmen serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, but focus on the place of those airmen within British culture and society.

The Crusades

danny.millum — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:51:36 +0000

Jan Guillou is a well-known Swedish author, journalist and political commentator.

The many faces of Thomas Cromwell

danny.millum — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:10:17 +0000

When a late-medieval or Tudor historian is asked to compare and contrast a historical novel with a scholarly book that both take as their subject Thomas Cromwell, and the latter work has been written by the late G. R. Elton, the inevitable disclaimer becomes compulsory unless that historian has spent several decades inhabiting a historiographically-isolated cave during the rise and fall of the Tudor revolution in government. In the present case, I must submit that I knew Sir Geoffrey during his last 15 years at Clare College, Cambridge and I still retain a cache of our letters.

Of Libraries and Commonplace Books: Reading the Enlightenment in Britain

danny.millum — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:13:16 +0000

David Allan’s Making British Culture and Mark R. M. Towsey’s Reading the Scottish Enlightenment pursue the same worthy goal: to give reading a larger role in the definition and conceptualisation of the Enlightenment, particularly in its Scottish manifestation. The connection between the two books runs deep. Towsey remarks that he was Allan’s student at St Andrews from his undergraduate days through supervision of the PhD thesis that evolved into his book (p. xii), and he has clearly learned much from his mentor.

Humanitarianism and Humanitarian Intervention

danny.millum — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:02:06 +0000

Humanitarianism, and its more forceful and controversial corollary, ‘humanitarian intervention’, have come under increasing scrutiny over the past few years. The recent ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Libya in the spring has rekindled popular interest in a trending academic topic, which has involved the critical examination of humanitarianism (1), humanitarian organisations (2), humanitarian aid (3) and humanitarian intervention (4).

John A. Macdonald and Thomas D'Arcy McGee

danny.millum — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 16:27:32 +0000

Both of these books are about an important figure in 19th-century Canadian political history. Few books on purely Canadian topics are reviewed for this website. However, both of these men will be of interest to historians outside of Canada. They were born in the British Isles and had political careers that transcended the boundaries of the present-day Canadian nation-state. It is therefore appropriate that these works should feature here.

Migration, Settlers and the British Empire

danny.millum — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 11:12:26 +0000

Those disinclined to judge their book by its cover will be pleased to discover that the image adorning the latest volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire (OHBE) series bears little relation to its contents. Showing the famous long bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, it presents the imperial British in exemplary (if not stereotypical) terms. Beneath heads of game and panels of oak, gentleman in knee socks and ladies in pink unwind amidst the chintz.

Combat Resilience in the First World War – a Historiographical Review

danny.millum — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:04:38 +0000

The First World War was a terrible experience that most soldiers were shocked by once they became active participants. How were soldiers’ able to cope with the grim realities of this war? How were they able to keep going in spite of losing close friends and comrades in one battle after another? How were they able to function as a soldier, much less a human being, in conditions that defy explanation? Trench warfare was an alien world that sapped a man’s strength and wits with each passing day. In such conditions, how did soldiers’ keep sharp and carry out their duties?

Fascism and Anti-Fascism Between the Wars

danny.millum — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:51:25 +0000

Two decades ago, it was possible for historians of fascism in Britain to remark that the literature of their subject was unnecessarily limited. Up to that point, writers had accepted two self-imposed restrictions which were no longer capable of justification. First, historians had kept their research to the inter-war period, neglecting almost entirely such post-war organisations as the National Front (NF) and the British National Party (BNP).

Monumenta Borgia: Sanctus Franciscus Borgia quartus Gandiae Dux et Societatis Iesu Praepositus Generalis tertius

danny.millum — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 11:21:56 +0000

St Francis Borja – in Spanish, S. Francisco de Borja – IV Duke of Gandia and III General of the Society of Jesus (1510–1566) was one of the most interesting and influential men of the Spanish 16th century. Head of one of the senior noble families of Spain, he had a dazzling political and courtly career before renouncing the world in 1551 to enter the Society of Jesus; he was one of the closest collaborators of Ignatius of Loyola in establishing the new Society and he spent his last years (1565–72) as its General.

Ten Years of Debate on the Origins of the Great Divergence

danny.millum — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:48:42 +0000

Ten Years of Debate on the Origins of the Great Divergence between the Economies of Europe and China during the Era of Mercantilism and Industrialization

1. Smith, Marx and Weber

Slavery Counted, Slavery Defined and Slavery Online

danny.millum — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 13:28:36 +0000

The proliferation of computer databases and the digitization of sources online are transforming the profession. Scholars can now do substantial original research without needing to travel to distant archives. Massive collections of documents are at our fingertips. Online databases are encouraging the democratization of historical research. Sources once available to only a few are now readily available to anyone with internet access and there is no threat of digitized manuscripts or rare books being damaged by excessive or improper use.

Processing Problematic Pasts: Recent Works on the Legacies of the Algerian War of Independence

danny.millum — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:21:03 +0000

As the title of the first volume under consideration asserts, France is currently in the grip of a divisive and destabilising phenomenon. Guerres de Mémoires, or wars of memories, are currently wracking the land, calling into question national identity and even challenging the hallowed Republican model. Writing in the preface to this edited collection, Benjamin Stora explains the gestation of these memory wars in the following terms:

Masculinity, Shell Shock, and Emotional Survival in the First World War

danny.millum — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:54:00 +0000

Introduction: trauma, modernity, and the First World War

Science, Technology and Culture in the Midlands During the Industrial Revolution

danny.millum — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:10:58 +0000

The Industrial Revolution has traditionally been seen as a transformation in the technological basis of production and in the social arrangements surrounding it. On the other hand, the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries was originally conceived as a purely intellectual transition, a shift in mentalities or worldviews.

England’s Past for Everyone Series

danny.millum — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:04:18 +0000

In February 2005 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded over £3 million to the Victoria County History (VCH) – the high priest of England’s local history – to establish an ambitious new local history project, England’s Past for Everyone (EPE). The project had some impressive targets: it had to commission, research and produce 15 new local histories, and the new histories were to come in several different formats.

Museums and Culture

danny.millum — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:25:03 +0000

Whose culture, and more specifically whose objects, are the central questions in these two very different books. In modern Western legal systems, objects can have only one owner, though that owner may be a corporate or collective body. But what does it mean for a state or nation or community to own an object, and what should we make of claims to hold objects in trust for all humanity? James Cuno’s polemical book has one set of answers to these questions; in a more empirical and historically grounded work, John MacKenzie has another.

Review Article:Radicalism and Protest

danny.millum — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:46:42 +0000

The clash between radicalism and loyalism in the early industrial revolution period created the basic progressive-conservative political divide that was to structure British politics until the fall of communism.

Colonization in Early America

danny.millum — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:50:17 +0000

These books present reassessments of the colonizer/colonized relationship and how individuals and groups negotiated their space in conflict, spanning the period from earlier colonization to the brink of the American Revolution.

Australia, Canada and Empire

danny.millum — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:51:49 +0000

The bowels of university libraries are often cluttered with the remnants of past historical approaches. The Cambridge History of the British Empire (1929-59) is one such work. At its core was a triumphal tale of the constitutional evolution of an empire into the ‘British Commonwealth’, a narrative which placed the old dominions (as Britain’s various self-governing settler colonies became known in 1907) centre stage.

Women's Work in the Eighteenth Century

danny.millum — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:48:14 +0000

Work in the 18th century has long been neglected by historians, who have focused instead on other aspects of economic life: notably consumption, but also on the legal structures of inheritance and marriage which shaped working lives over the life cycle. So we can identify the legal differences and similarities between 18th-century Brittany and Britain. Inheritance was partible in Brittany, in theory equally divided among all children, although the eldest male generally got the dwelling house.