Autumn Books 2003

Archaeology and the Ancient World

In Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans (HarperCollins, £25), Francis Pryor marshals the archaeological evidence to show that British civilisation existed long before the Romans, and that pre-Roman culture continues to have an impact today.

Wolfram Gratetzi studies attitudes to death in Egypt from 5000 BC to AD 200 in his ambitious project, Burial Customs in Ancient Egypt: Life in Death for Rich and Poor (Duckworth, £14.99).

Egyptian death is also one of the topics covered in Joann Fletcher's The Egyptian Book of Living and Dying (Duncan Baird, £9.99).

Egypt: 4000 Years of Art by Jaromir Malek (Phaidon, £24.95) examines a range of Egyptian artefacts from architecture and sculpture to painting and jewellery.

David Silverman’s Ancient Egypt (Reference Classics, Duncan Baird Publishing, £14.99) offers a good overview of the history and culture of this mysterious civilisation.

Periplus have launched the new 22-volume Encyclopaedia of Underwater Archaeology and aim to add up to six instalments per year, starting with Master Seafarers: the Phoenicians and the Greeks . The Encyclopaedia is geared not only towards the avid diver or archaeologist, but also towards the general reader, keen to find out how sonar detection systems and remote-controlled submersibles have allowed modern man to reclaim symbols of human history once considered to be inaccessible.

Historical Atlas of the Holy Lands (Eurospan, £26.95) by Karen Farrington forms part of this publisher’s Historical Atlas series and, above all, examines the most recent research into events and legends depicted in the Bible. Angus Konstam explores the political and cultural history of the Greeks in Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece (Eurospan, £26.95) as part of the same series.

Adrienne Mayor’s timely study, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Duckworth, £20), poses questions about the ethical nature of warfare, a key issue highlighted by recent events in the world.

Andrew Dalby uses poems, narrative, myths and dramas to help tell the story of the celebrated Greek and Roman god of wine in Bacchus: A Biography (British Museum Press, £14.99).

Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities by Bruce W. Winter (Eerdmans, £18.99) studies the ‘new woman’ in the first century AD, a woman who did not conform to traditional models of femininity.

Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland (Little, Brown £20) offers a vivid narrative of the Roman republic from the fall of Carthage to that of Caesar, 150 years later.

In Tiberius, Reluctant Caesar (UpFront Publishing, £20.99,) George Vass shows how politicians, lieutenants and family members attempted to tarnish the reputation and lower the morale of one of most gifted sovereigns of the Roman Empire.

Nero by Edward Champlin (Harvard University Press, £19.95) shows how Nero’s ostentatious displays of insensitivity can be attributed to his perception of himself as an artist and hero.

In Roman Artillery (Shire Books, £5.99) Alan Wilkins emphasises the impact that the Romans have had on mechanised warfare and technology in the West since the time of Caesar. His book contains previously unpublished illustrations, and reconstructions based on archaeological finds.

The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest (Norton History Titles, £19.95) by Peter S. Wells studies the events of the battle that checked Rome’s expansion across the Rhine in the first decade of the Christian era.

Thomas S. Burns argues that the extended Roman empire was governed by ideals such as integration and tolerance in Rome and the Barbarians, 100 BC–AD 400 (John Hopkins University Press, £37).

Looking at the hoards uncovered in Mildenhall, Thetford and Sevso, Ruth E. Leader highlights silver’s role as an imperial emissary and conveyer of religious belief, from the western to the eastern corners of the Roman Empire in Silver and Society in Late Antiquity: Functions and Meanings of Silver Plate in the Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Ashgate, £50).

Kevin Butcher studies the history of Syria through its ruins in Roman Syria and the Near East (British Museum, £25).

The cultural significance of icons in Rome, Cairo, the Medieval West and Byzantium is examined in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium (Ashgate, £55) edited by Anthony Eastmond and Liz James. 

J.B. Bullen’s stunningly illustrated, interdisciplinary study, Byzantium Rediscovered: The Byzantine Revival in Europe and America (Phaidon, £45) looks at the impact of this great empire on European and American politics, religion and the arts.

John Collis argues that misconceptions formed during the 16th century still influence our attitudes towards archaeological sources in Celts: Origins and Re-inventions (Tempus, £17.99).

Who finds treasure and how is it to be protected from theft? Richard Hobbs examines such issues in Treasure: Finding our Past (British Museum, £9.99), a book which accompanies the major exhibition at the British Museum.

Ancient Wine: The Scientific Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press, £19.95) by Patrick E. McGovern documents the history of wine since the Neolithic period.

The Medieval World

The two-volume Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia , edited by Christopher Kleinhenz and Richard Lansing (Routledge, £205), is the first A-Z reference devoted to this churning nexus of European civilisation, with over 1,000 entries.

In Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice (John Hopkins University Press, £37) Thomas F. Madden examines the life of Venice’s most prestigious doge, Enrico Dandolo, and considers his influence on the development of the city state between the 11th and 13th centuries while examining the city’s role in European diplomacy.

The final volume in The Visual Culture of Wales series, Peter Lord’s Medieval Vision (University of Wales Press, £30), considers how Christianity influenced life, art and belief in Wales from the 5th century to the early 16th century. Lord’s work is illustrated with 450 specially commissioned full-colour images.

Sean Davies studies attitudes to war in Wales, looking at Welsh military households, battle tactics and the military in Welsh Military Institutions: c. 633-1283 (University of Wales Press, £35).

In Who Murdered Chaucer? (Methuen, £17.99) Terry Jones stirs up controversy over the nature of the death of England’s most celebrated writer of the later Middle Ages.

David Miller presents the controversial Richard I as a thoughtful commander and the only crusader leader of his day who managed to get his army to Palestine without going bankrupt, in Richard the Lionheart: The Mighty Crusader (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99).

Medieval Cookery (English Heritage, £6.99) is part of the English Heritage’s Cooking Through the Ages series and not only looks at taste and etiquette in the Middle Ages but also boasts more than thirty original recipes for modern kitchens.

Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady (Palgrave, £40) edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons is a collection of essays that set Eleanor’s life within a wider context of gender and power relations in the medieval period.

Linda E. Mitchell studies the lives and experiences of noblewomen in Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Social Relationships in Thirteenth Century England (Palgrave, £32.50).

Kathleen Nolan edits Capetian Women (Palgrave, £40), a series of essays which argue that far from being restricted by their royal milieu, Capetian women in France were able to exert influence over social, political and religious circles and were also key figures in shaping French cultural identity through their patronage of the arts.

Richard E. Zeikowitz examines 14th-century attitudes towards homosexuality and shows how writers utilised and subverted traditional modes of self-expression, such as the marriage drama and the chivalric tale, in order to explore homoerotic desire in Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-sex Desire in the 14th Century (Palgrave, £42.50).

Flower of Chivalry: Bertrand du Guesclin and the Hundred Years War (Boydell & Brewer, £30) by Richard Vernier looks at the rise to glory and considers the legacy of the chivalric hero who led France in the Hundred Years War.

Michael Kauffman examines sculpture, early printed books and wall-paintings in a spectacularly illustrated volume, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England 700-1550   (Brepols, Euro 105).

The Sutton Companion to Castles by Stephen Friar (Sutton, £20) is an alphabetically arranged and lavishly illustrated reference book of technical terms relating to castle architecture and usage.

Tadhg O'Keeffe's Romanesque Ireland: architecture and ideology in the twelfth century (Four Courts Press, £40) is the most detailed study of Romanesque Ireland in the last thirty years and looks at the ways in which ‘style’ can be seen to shape national identity.

In The Cockleshell Pilgrim: A Medieval Journey to Compostela (SPCK Publishing, £9.99) Katherine Lack investigates the identity of a man whose remains were unearthed in Worcester Cathedral in 1986. Her exciting study describes his pilgrimage through a plague-ridden Europe to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Urban Europe 1100-1700 by David Nicholas (Palgrave, £16.99) is a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study exploring the links between the city in the late medieval and the early modern periods.

Early Modern Britain and Europe

June Osbourne’s Urbino: The Story of a Renaissance City (Frances Lincoln, £35) tells the story of the stunning ducal city that became a Mecca for artists such as Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello and became the setting for Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier . The book includes a foreword by Sir John Mortimer and photography by Joe Cornish.

Venetian Painting in the Fifteenth Century: Jacopo, Gentile, Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna (Brepols, Euro 110) by Otto Paecht is a collection of scholarly lectures, translated into English by Fiona Elliot.

Niccolo Machiavelli’s classic text Art of War (£17.50) has been re-issued by the University of Chicago Press with a new translation and commentary by Christopher Lynch.

The Barbary Corsairs: Warfare in the Mediterranean 1480-1580 by Jacques Heers (Greenhill, £18.99) offers a robust and enthralling account of the world of the Barbarossa brothers and the effect of their privateering on trade and commerce in the Mediterranean.

Ross King’s Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (Pimlico, £9.99) is an enthralling account of the difficulties experienced and the discoveries made by Michelangelo during the four year-long painting of the Sistine Chapel.

The Renaissance Drill Book , by Jacob de Gheyn (Greenhill, £14.99) was an immense success when first published in 1607, and is a manual of how to handle a caviler and musket correctly. Published with an introduction by David Blackmore.

Tim Tatton-Brown and Richard Mortimer document the history of Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII (Boydell & Brewer, £50), the epitome of the late Perpendicular style in architecture.

Andrew Chibi looks at the lives of the men who were crucially involved in church and state, spirituality and temporality in Henry VIII’s Bishops (James Clark & Co., £50)

Harry Potter has written an account of the siege of Edinburgh when civil war raged over the dethroning of Mary Stuart, and an English force attacked the Scottish capital, in Edinburgh Under Siege 1571-1573 (Tempus, £14.99).

Green Desires: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens , by Rebecca Bushnell (Cornell, £17.95), investigates early gardening manuals, and analyses the dignity and pleasure of garden labour, showing that gardening was not just a practical activity but one of the imagination as well, at this period.

James Travers consults original documents and the letters of Shakespeare in an attempt to reveal the real personality of England’s first Stuart king in
James I: The Masque of Monarchy (The National Archives, £14.99).
John Miller provides a detailed account of the monarchs of the Stuart dynasty and also examines the lineage in its entirety in The Stuarts (Hambledon and London, £19.95).

Diarmaid MacCullough’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (Allen Lane, £25) is a wide-ranging survey of the great upheaval in European history created by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and seeks to establish a new synthesis from the divergent research of scholars over recent years.

William G. Naphy’s Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation, With a New Preface (John Knox Press & Geneva Press, $39.95; $62 Canada) explains the reasons behind Calvin’s rise to prominence in 16th-century Genevan society. Naphy’s work is widely regarded as the most significant contribution to Calvin scholarship in recent years.

Brennan C. Pursell argues that the Thirty Years’ War should be considered an extension of religious and political battles fought within the Holy Roman Empire in The Winter King: Frederick V of the Palatinate and the Coming of the Thirty Years’ War (Ashgate, £49.95).

T.M. Devine explores the contribution of the Scots to the forging and expansion of the British empire, and its effects on Scotland itself, in Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815 (Penguin, £25).

The Whale Book: Whales and Other Marine Animals as Described by Adriaen Coenen in 1584 (Reaktion Books, £25) is a captivating book, containing the naïve drawings of whales and other creatures made by the beachcomber Coenen off the coast of 16th-century Holland.

Steven Nadler’s Rembrandt’s Jews (University of Chicago Press, £17.50) describes the artist as neighbour, friend and painter of Jews in Amsterdam and offers an intriguing insight into Judaism in 17th-century Europe.

Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth Century England (Yale, £25): Laura Gowing  looks at how ordinary women understood and experienced their bodies, and what they knew, thought and felt about virginity, pregnancy, childbirth, barrenness and miscarriage.

Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Ashgate, £45), by Lucinda M. Becker, traces attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, and illuminates the construction of femininity in the period.

In Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, £45), Alexandra Shepard demonstrates the contradictions within patriarchal ideology, and shows how it was undermined by both men and women.

Howard and Edward Wilson’s The Vyne: A Tudor House Revealed (The National Trust, £17.99) emphasises the significance of this house, built by William Sandys.

Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle by Katie Whitaker (Chatto, £20) studies the first Englishwoman to make a living through her writing (who once wrote of herself ‘My mind’s too big’), against the backdrop of the Civil Wars.

The Eighteenth Century

Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (British Museum, £29.95), edited by Kim Sloan, shows how information about the world was collected and organised two hundred years ago, in a colourful volume of essays associated with a new permanent exhibition to be located in the King’s Library of the British Museum.

Flesh in the Age of Reason , by Roy Porter (Allen Lane, £25), the final work by the prolific historian who died last year, investigates the Enlightenment from the unfamiliar angle of its attitudes to the body and the soul, through an investigation of such men as Johnson and Swift to Blake and Byron.

Robert Darnton’s George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (Norton, £16.95) looks again at the Enlightenment and restores to it a human scale.

Part of English Heritage’s Cooking Through the Ages series, Georgian Cookery (£6.99) looks at the effects of new technology on food, and contains over fifty recipes from the eighteenth century.

Written by a Quaker scholar, Strength in Weakness: Writings of Eighteenth-Century Quaker Women (AltaMira Press, £50) by Gil Skidmore shows how an analysis of autobiographies, journals and memoirs can inform studies of Quakerism today.

Nicolas Atkin and Frank Tallett assess Catholicism’s role in national and international politics in Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750 (I.B.Tauris, £25).

In The Signers of the Declaration of Independence: A Biographical and Genealogical Reference (Eurospan, £34.50) Della Gray Barthelmas provides biographies of the 56 signatories, including the secretary, Charles Thomson, who did not himself sign the document but attended the meetings.

Discoveries: The Voyage of Captain Cook , by Nicholas Thomas (Allen Lane, £25) presents the familiar tale of the exploration of the Pacific from the unfamiliar perspective of a leading anthropologist.

Mutiny! The Real Story of the HMS Bounty (Cooper Square Press, £12.95) by Sir John Barrow (1764-1848) gives an account of the way in which the famous mutiny left the HMS Bounty stranded in the Pacific Ocean and shows how Lieutenant William Bligh navigated his men to safety on Pitcairn Island, using only a sextant and pocket watch.

Patrick Barbier brings to life the magic of 18th-century Venice during the six-month long carnival and paints a colourful portrait of Vivaldi, the Venetian ‘Red Priest’, in the lavishly illustrated Vivaldi’s Venice (Souvenir Press, £18.99).

Anna Clark’s Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton University Press, £24.95) examines scandal in the 18th and 19th centuries and shows how it shaped the course of democracy.

The Courtesan’s Revenge: Hariette Wilson, the Woman who Blackmailed the King , by Frances Wilson (Faber, £20), relates the story of the courtesan who was the lover of four prime ministers and countless aristocrats, and who told all in her memoirs of 1825.

London and England

Peter Ackroyd’s Illustrated London (Chatto & Windus, £25) is a welcome supplement to his best-selling volume London: The Biography and contains more than 200 images, including drawings, maps, paintings and modern graphics.

Kenneth Panton’s illustrated dictionary, London: A Historical Companion (Tempus, £25), looks at many aspects of London’s history, including the people, buildings, and institutions and their effects on London’s history over the past millennia.

London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books, £19.95) is a compilation of essays examining the order and chaos, the splendour and squalor, the excitement and danger of London, and is recommended to those wishing to explore this most multifaceted of world cities.

Fergus Linnane offers a secret history of 1,000 years of vice and naughtiness, and the social reality behind prostitution, in London: The Wicked City (Robson, £18.95).

Looking at personalities and policies, James Fenton provides a detailed account of the fortunes of one of London’s most revered cultural institutions in The Royal Academy of Arts: A History (Royal Academy Press, £35.

Alan Crosby tells the remarkable story of the growth, since 1800, of what is often presumed to be a nondescript commuter town in A History of Woking (Phillimore, £20).

The Kent & Sussex Weald (Phillimore, £25), by Peter Brandon, studies man’s changing attitudes towards areas of natural beauty such as Ashdown Forest and west Kent, showing how areas of forest were cultivated to meet the needs of Kent’s handicraft industry and the sporting activities of the Edwardian ‘nouveaux riches’.

Stuart Hylton’s A History of Manchester (Phillimore, £18.99) gives a good overview of the city’s history from the first Roman mud and timber forts to the Anti-Corn Law League, the founding of the Manchester Guardian and the building of the airport.

Keith Proud examines the history of one of the most spectacular cities in the north of England in Durham (Phillimore, £15.99).

Founded in 1899, The Victoria County History , published by Boydell & Brewer, is a key work of reference for English local history.  This year’s publications are A History of the County of Cheshire v.ii: The city of Chester (£60); A History of the County of Stafford ix: Burton upon Trent (£75) and A History of the Country of Somerset viii: The Poldens and the Levels (£75).

Pamela Sambrook gives a glimpse of the day-to-day running of a Cheshire country house in A Country House at Work: Three Centuries of Dunham Massey (The National Trust, £18.99).

Canada and America

In Sensory Worlds in Early America (John Hopkins University Press, £29.50) Peter Charles Hoffer examines the impact not only of social and political circumstances, but of perception and sensation on events in Northern American colonial history.

The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord (The New Press, £10.95) by Ray Raphael tells the story of the events leading up to America’s breakaway from Britain.

Gore Vidal extends his analysis of American life and culture to a study of the three major architects of American democracy in Fathers of the Republic: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the invention of a Nation (Yale University Press, £14.95).

Matthew C. Ward examines the effects of war in the Virginia and Pennsylvania backcountry and what the British military learnt from it in Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754-1765 (University of Pittsburgh Press, $34.95).

Carolyn Gilman has collected artifacts from over 50 institutions that were gathered on Lewis and Clark’s journey across American Indian territory. With a foreword by James P. Carolyn, Gilman’s Lewis & Clark: Across the Divide (Smithsonian Books, $60), published for the bicentenary of their journey, describes the equipment they used and the communities they encountered in their adventures.

Edward L. Ayers’ In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 (Norton History Titles, £22) describes the impact of starvation, death and disease on inhabitants of the Great Valley.

In Vicksburg (Chrysalis, £14.99) T. A. Heathcote examines land and river tactics employed in this pivo-tal battle of the American Civil War Encyclopaedia of Native American Wars and Warfare (Eurospan, £49.50) edited by William Kessler and Robert Wooster studies conflicts between Indians, Native Americans and non-Indians from 1492 to the late 1800s.

From football games to Christmas holidays and Christian music, R. Laurence Moore’s Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History (Westminster John Knox Press & Geneva Press, $19.95; $30 Canada) examines the way in which religion and popular culture shaped America’s history and its unique national identity.

Archbishop A.-A. Taché of St. Boniface: The “Good Fight” and the Illusive Vision (University of Alberta Press, $39.95) by Raymond Joseph Armand Huel shows how Taché’s missionary work among the natives of Canada in the 19th century can be studied against a backdrop of events in Canadian history, including the Red River Insurrection and the Manitoba schools question.

From Preachers to Suffragists: Woman’s Rights and Religious Conviction in the Lives of Three Nineteenth-Century American Clergywomen (Westminster John Knox Press & Geneva Press $24.95; $37 Canada) by Beverly Zink-Sawyer challenges widely held assumptions about the origins of the American suffrage movement and argues that the motivation behind the movement was primarily religious.

A Documentary History of Religion in America to 1877 (Eerdmans, $27.99) edited by Edwin S. Gaustad and Mark A. Noll uses letters, sermons and court records to give us an understanding of America’s religious history.

David L. Chappell re-examines the reasons behind the victory of the integrationists over the segregationists in A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (UNC Press, $34.95).

Larry J. Zimmerman looks at the lives and beliefs of the native inhabitants of American Indians: The First Nations: Native North American Life, Myth and Art (Duncan Baird Publishing, £12.99).

North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones (UNC Press, $27.50), edited by William L. Andrews, is a collection of outstanding examples of nineteenth-century slave writing.

Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories by Jean Humez (University of Wisconsin Press, $45) includes a biography of Tubman and the tales she told about her life.

At First Sight: Photography and the Smithsonian (Smithsonian Books,  $60) by Merry A. Foresta boasts previously unpublished photographs taken from the museum, which was set up at the time when photography was invented.

Paul Voisey’s High River and the Times: An Alberta Community and Its Weekly Newspaper, 1905-1966 (University of Alberta Press, $29.95) looks at the paper’s rise to prominence under the ownership of the Charles Clark family.

Issues such as industrialisation and pollution are covered in Redeeming the Smoky City: Perspectives on the Environmental History of Pittsburgh and its Region (Pittsburgh University Press, $32) edited by Joel A. Tarr.

Chicago was the first city to witness key events such as the building of the skyscraper and the world’s first atomic reactor as well as the founding of urban sociology. In The Pig and the Skyscraper Chicago: A History of Our Future (Verso, £13) Marco D’Eramo considers Chicago’s history and the city’s role in the development of American culture and capitalism.

Margerita de Orellana’s Filming Pancho: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution (Verso, £15; £40) translated by John King, coincides with the release of an HBO film of Pancho Villa’s life.

Eliza Steelwater’s vehement critique of capital punishment, The Hangman’s Knot: Lynching, Legal Exhibition, and America’s Struggle with the Death Penalty (The Perseus Group, £19.99) argues that capital punishment is merely a form of state-sanctioned mob violence.

Rolling On: The Story of the Amazing Gary McPherson (University of Alberta Press, $24.95) by Gerald W. Hankins chronicles the achievements of Gary McPherson who contracted polio during the 1950s yet went on to become the executive-director of the Canadian Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.

Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman
and Diplomat  (Smithsonian Books, $32.95) by Don Oberdorfer studies the career of the longest-serving majority leader in Washington D.C.

The life of one of the most influential figures in American history is considered in William S. McFeely’s Ulysses S. Grant: An Album (Norton, £35.00).

Edward Pearce offers a vivid account of one of the crucial Parliamentary debates of the 19th century in Reform!: The Fight for the Reform Act 1830-1832 (Jonathan Cape, £20).

Using case studies from the Old Bailey,  Joel Peter Eigen explores ‘double consciousness’ in Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London (John Hopkins University Press, £29.50) and discusses its impact on modern studies of the human psyche.

Katherine Watson analyses the motives, describes the poisons employed and the nature of surreptitious killers, including Dr Crippen, Harold Shipman and the Victorian murderess, Mary Anne Cotton in Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and their Victims (Hambledon and London, £19.95).

The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

John Hannavy’s The English Seaside in Victorian and Edwardian Times (Shire Books, £9.99) traces the history of holiday souvenirs from the early photographic print to the picture postcard and coloured photograph of the 1890s.

In Fertile Fortune: The Story of Tyntesfield (The National Trust, £19.99) Sotheby’s James Miller, shows how the inhabitants of this Victorian country house made their mark on this awe-inspiring example of Gothic architecture.

Cambridge in the 1830s: The Letters of Alexander Chisholm Gooden (Boydell & Brewer £50) edited by Jonathan Stray and Christopher Smith, examines the life and tragic death of a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate. The book gives a fascinating insight into early-Victorian student life at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Collection (Verso, £14) edited by Andrew Berry, with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, looks at the political writings of the great biologist.

Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800-1928 by James Milles (Oxford, £25) is a lively study exploring the historical background of cannabis legislation, arguing that the drive towards prohibition grew out of the politics of empire rather than scientific or rational assessment of the drug’s use and effects.

Gillian Cookson’s The Cable: The Wire that Changed the World (Tempus, £12.99) describes the processes involved and the dangers encountered when man attempted to lay the world’s first transatlantic cable in the mid-Victorian era.

Published in association with the recent television Channel 4 series, Sally Dugan’s Men of Iron: Brunel, Stephenson and the inventions that shaped the modern world (Channel 4 Books, £20) focuses on the achievements of Brunel and Stephenson and assesses the legacy of their inventions on the world today.  A somewhat more scholarly study edited by Michael R. Bailey, Robert Stephenson – The Eminent Engineer (Ashgate, £55), features articles by railway and engineering experts who examine his achievements as an innovator, politician and visionary.

Douglas R. Nickel’s Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad (Princeton University Press, £45) assesses the impact of the Egyptologist’s photographs.

Drawings, maps, plans, and engravings accompany David Evans’ Building the Steam Navy: Dockyards, Technology, and the Creation of the Victorian Battle Fleet, 1830-1906 (Conway Maritime Press, £30).

Angela Thirlwell narrates the story of the passionate, but ultimately tragic, marriage that brought together two prominent Pre-Raphaelite families in William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis (Yale University Press, £25).

Paddy Linehan’s book Yesterday’s Ireland (David & Charles, £20) provides an fresh account of day-to-day life in Ireland in the last century, with 200 photographs.

Volume II of Roy Foster’s W.B. Yeats – a Life: The Arch-Poet (Oxford, £30; £15) takes this definitive account from 1915,  the poet’s fiftieth year, through the tumultuous years of the emergence of the Irish state.

In Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution, 1887-1922 (Cork University Press/Attic Press, £25) David Fitzpatrick shows how Bolland, the politician, can be compared to notable figures such as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. 

Pearse’s Patriots: St Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood (Cork University Press/Attic Press, £30) by Elaine Sisson shows how Patrick Pearse set up a school for boys in 1908 which was based on Christian ethics and Irish patriotism.

P.J. Mathews’ Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Cork University Press/ Attic Press, £19.95) re-examines the Irish Revival by assessing the role of movements such as the Abbey Theatre and Sinn Féin.

The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914 (Eerdmans, £32.99), edited by Andrew Porter, assesses the effects of imperial expansion on religious belief and measures responses to Christian teaching in India.

Edited by Brian Stanley, Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Eerdmans, £32.99) examines the unravelling of colonial empires in Asia and Africa and the relationship of Christianity to nationalism.

The suffragist Dr Margaret Phillips (1876-51) was one of the first female doctors to be educated in Manchester. Clifford H. Phillips’ The Lady Named Thunder: A Biography of Dr Ethel Margaret Phillips (1876-1951) (University of Alberta Press, $49.95) looks at her missionary work in China.

The compelling account of Scott’s fateful expedition to the Antarctic, The Worst Journey in the World (Random House, £8.99) by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959) has been reprinted with an introduction by Sara Wheeler.

Arthur Mee’s self-help book for middle classes and the ‘respectable poor’, 1906: Every Man For Himself! (The Kings’ England Press, £3.95) has been reprinted, edited by Maisie Robson. In addition, Arthur Mee’s Dream of England (King’s England Press, £4.95) by Maisie Robson shows how his writing fitted the cultural climate of the first half of the 20th century.

Stephen L. Dyson describes the life of one of the first women to be educated at university in England who went on to work in Mussolini’s Italy in Eugenie Sellers Strong: Portrait of An Archaeologist (Duckworth, £30).

Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s Uncrowned Emperor: The Life and Times of Otto von Habsburg (Hambledon and London, £19.95) is a portrayal of the head of the Habsburg family who disavowed Hitler’s plans to take over Austria, joined forces with Franklin Roosevelt and finally became a Member of the European Parliament.

Containing a foreword by Radio 4’s Jenni Murray The Women’s Century: A Celebration of Changing Roles, 1900-2000 (The National Archives, £19.99) by Mary Taylor chronicles women’s steps to emancipation during the twentieth century.

The First World War

Bert Frandsen studies the American 1st Pursuit Group in Hat in the Ring: The Birth of the American Air Power in the Great War (Smithsonian Books, $32.95).

Hugh Strachan’s The First World War (Simon and Schuster, £25) is a riveting illustrated narrative, including rare colour photographs, of the war by this leading scholar.

Commentary from the historian Charles Messenger accompanies World War One in Colour: The Definitive Illustrated History with over 200 Remarkable Full Colour Photographs (Ebury Press, £20). Original photographs have been converted into colour, the overall effect lends a sense of immediacy to photographs we are accustomed to viewing in black and white.

Thomas Fleming offers a critical examination of the policies taken by Woodrow Wilson during the Great War in The Illusion of Victory: Americans in World
War I (The Perseus Group, £22).

The Rape of Belgium (New York University Press, $29.95,) by Larry Zuckermann is an in-depth analysis of the atrocities committed in Belgium during the First World War.

The First War (Dorling Kindersley, £25) by a military historian, H.P. Willmott, is an accessible and moving account of the Great War, using timelines, maps and thematic panels to guide the reader through the events of the War.

Voices from the Great War (Random House, £8.99) is a vivid depiction by the critically acclaimed novelist and writer Peter Vansittart of the way in which a variety of people – politicians, poets, soldiers and music-hall singers among them – experienced the First World War.

Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the First World War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) offers a witty and revisionist history of Britain and the Great War

John H. Morrow draws our attention to the colonial soldiers who fought for the empires of Europe in The Great War: An Imperial History (Routledge, £25).

Allen J. Frantzen’s Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, £24.50) goes back to the Middle Ages in order to understand ideals of chivalry extolled by the Victorians and conveyed through posters, memorials and postcards during the First World War.

Storm of Steel , by Ernst Junger (Allen Lane, £14.99) is a new translation of a memoir of astonishing power, savagery and lyricism, which illuminates the horrors and the fascination of total war, presenting the conflict through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier.

America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 edited by Jay Winter (Cambridge, £35) is the first study, by nine eminent scholars, of the American response to the Armenian crisis.

Eastern Europe and Russia

The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton University Press, £11.95) by Marshall T. Poe is a concise re-examination of Russian history.

James Cracraft’s study The Revolution of Peter the Great (Harvard University Press, £16.95) promises a new perspective on the effects of the Tsar’s reforms on Russia.

St Petersburg: Russia’s Window to the Future: The First Three Centuries (Taylor Trade Publishing, £27) by Arthur L. George and Elena George celebrates the city founded in 1703 by the westernising Peter the Great.

Peter Julicher looks at Russian dissidents from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the demise of the Romanovs in 1917 in Renegades, Rebels and Rogues Under the Tsars (Eurospan, £30.50).

John Ure’s The Cossacks: An Illustrated History (Duckworth, £30) is a stimulating examination of the changing role and attitudes towards the Russian warriors who were both feared and admired, vilified and romanticised throughout Russia’s colourful history.

The Fate of the Romanovs by Gregory King and Penny Wilson (John Wiley and Sons, £19.99) is a painstaking examination of the last months in the lives of the captive Russian royal family.

Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917-1929 (Pittsburgh University Press, $44.95) edited by James W. Heinzen looks at hostilities within the Party and argues that the Soviet state was less totalitarian than once thought.

The Unknown Stalin (I.B.Tauris & Co., £19.95) by Zhores A. Medvedev & Roy A. Medvedev is an in-depth study of one of the cruellest dictators in world history.

A revealing portrait of Stalin and his circle, in intimate detail, is presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25).

Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church by Judity Deutsch Kornblatt (Wisconsin University Press, $29.95) studies the mass conversion of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity in the 1960s and the 1980s.

Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Czarist Russian, 1892-1914 (Wisconsin University Press, $45.00) by Joshua D. Zimmerman illustrates the ways in which the Polish Socialist Party championed equal rights for Jews and minority groups in Poland.

The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton University Press, £12.95) edited by Antony Polonsky & Joanna B. Michlic looks at the impact of this  Jewish massacre on Poland.

Asia, Central Asia and the Far East

Mark Ravina’s The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori (John Wiley and Sons, £16.50) offers an intriguing insight into samurai culture and feudalism in Japan, as manifested in the Meiji age of the late nineteenth century.

John Peacock explores the magic of Tibet in The Tibetan Way of Life, Death and Rebirth (Duncan Baird Publishing, £14.99).

The politics, economics and culture of Eurasia are examined in First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500-1800 (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, £61; £22.95) by Geoffrey C. Gunn.

Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh Press, $34.95) by Paula Michaels shows how the Soviet government’s bid to bring biomedicine to Kazakhstan masked darker plans to infiltrate and destroy Kazakh culture.   

Sumantra Bose suggests methods for conflict resolution in South Asia in Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Harvard University Press,  £16.95).

Judith M. Brown examines the life and times of one of India’s great democratic rulers and founder of the modern nation, in her Nehru: A Political Life (Yale University Press, £25).

Rayne Kruger provides a fascinating account of one the world’s oldest civilisations in All Under Heaven: A complete history of China (John Wiley and Sons, £16.99).

Anton Pelinka examines the life of the man who rivalled Nehru as successor to Gandhi in Democracy Indian Style: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Creation of India’s Political Culture (Eurospan, £41.50, trans. Renee Schell).

Rayne Kruger provides a fascinating account of one the world’s oldest civilisations in All Under Heaven: A complete history of China (John Wiley and Sons, £16.99).

Hong Kong’s expansion from a fishing village into a major British colony and financial power-house is the subject of Steve Tsang’s A Modern History of Hong-Kong (I.B.Tauris & Co., £35).

Red-color News Soldier (Phaidon, £24.95) by Li Zhensheng is a remarkable collection of hitherto unseen photographs, which were secretly taken by the photojournalist, Li Zhensheng, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Chinese Warfaring: The PLA Experience Since 1949 (Eurospan, £22.50) is co-edited by Mark A.Ryan and forms part of the series entitled An East Gate Book, looking at Chinese military campaigns up to the present day.

The Dictators, The Second World War and the Holocaust

The psychologist David Lewis sets out to explain how psychiatric treatment in 1918 helped Hitler transform himself from a drifter and a frustrated artist into the most charismatic leader of the 20th century, in The Man Who Invented Hitler (Headline, £20).

Peter Neville shows how Mussolini’s plans to turn Italy into a Great Power were thwarted by infighting within the Fascist party in his new biography Mussolini (Routledge, £9.99).

Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933-1939: Before War and Holocaust , by Dan Stone (Palgrave, £50) uses a wide body of neglected literature to consider how Nazism was perceived in the interwar years.

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso, £8) has been reprinted with a new and shocking postscript for the 21st century.

A History of the Dora Camp: The Untold Story of the Nazi Concentration Camp That Secretly Manufactured V-2 Rockets (Ivan R. Dee, £27) by Andre Sellier is a first-hand account of the atrocities witnessed by one man while imprisoned in one of the largest Nazi concentration camps.

Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto (Granta Books, Royal £20) edited by Michal Grynberg, introduced and translated by Philip Boehm, is a remarkable collection of written testimonies of men and women who suffered in the ghettos during the Second World War.

The Lesser Evil: the Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-1953 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25) is the third and final volume of the diaries of this Jew from Dresden which have been hailed as one of the most important chronicles of the 20th century.

Tank Rider: Into the Reich with the Red Army by Evgeni Bessonov (Greenhill, £18.99) are dramatic and irrepressibly frank memoirs of what it was like to fight on the Eastern front, written by an officer in an elite Guards unit of the red Army.

In The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory and the Second World War (Methuen, £7.99) Adam Nossiter focuses on events that occurred at Bordeaux, Tulle and Vichy in order to assess the nature of France’s collaboration with the Nazis.

Containing a foreword by Christopher du P. Roosevelt, Robert F. Cross’ Sailor in the White House: The Seafaring Life of FDR (Naval Institute, $28.95) looks at the ways in which Roosevelt’s love of seafaring influenced those around him and even effected events of the Second World War.

Ten Days to D-Day: Countdown to the Liberation of Europe by David Stafford (Little, Brown, £20) looks at the events leading up to the invasion of Europe, day by day, from the perspective of a selection of people, ranging from a 19-year-old Wren, to a school teacher with the French Resistance, a Norwegian political prisoner and Nazi commander Erwin Rommel.

Martin H. Folly’s The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of World War Two (Palgrave Macmillan, £45; £14.99) is a must for students studying the geo-politics of the World War.

A CD featuring the voices of veterans and survivors accompanies World War II – The People’s Story (£25), a photographic collection of memories published by the Reader’s Digest.

Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth’s interdisciplinary study, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy , Revised Edition (John Knox Press & Geneva Press, $29.95; $45 Canada) has been reissued with an examination of recent developments in Holocaust studies.

Hans Mommsen gives a frank description of the enemies of Nazism in Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance Under the Third Reich (I.B. Tauris & Co., £25 trans. Angus McGeoch).

Christopher R. Browning, whose expert evidence played a key role in the David Irving/Penguin libel case,  discusses the uses of primary source material in Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (University of Wisconsin Press, $35).

Air Commodore Graham Pitchfork studies previously unpublished documents in Shot Down and on the Run: The RAF and Commonwealth aircrews who got home from behind enemy lines, 1940-1945 (The National Archives, £19.99).

For Your Freedom and Ours: The Kosciuszko, Forgotten heroes of World War II (Hein, £20), by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud, is the first full account of the Polish fighter pilots of the RAF in the Battle of Britain and thereafter.

World War II in the Pacific (Eurospan, £20.50) by Mark Roehrs and William A. Renzi examines relations between the United States and Japan from the 1930s up to the detonation of the atomic bomb.

Gerald Horne assesses the impact of non-white, anti-American racism on the outcome of the war in Race War!: Whites, Blacks and Asians in World War II’s Pacific Theatre (New York University Press, $34.95).

Philip Grove’s Midway (Chrysalis, £14.99) looks at the events of June 1942 when the island of Midway was attacked by both Japanese and American planes.

The PostWar World

Peter Kornbluh’s investigates the reasons behind America’s collaboration with the Chilean dictator in The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (The New New Press, £18.95).

A CD of unedited recordings of presidential meetings at the Oval Office accompanies John Prados’ White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President (The New Press, including CD £34.95).

The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the Cold War (£45; £14.99) by John Swift gives students a good overview of the geography and socio-political dimensions of the Cold War.

Robert Dallek’s huge biography, John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life (Allen Lane,  £25) offers a full portrait of the strengths and weaknesses of the US president. Meanwhile, the publication of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Life in Pictures (Phaidon, £24.95) marks the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.

Alice L. George looks at the public’s response to the threat of nuclear war in Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis (UNC Press, $29.95).

Leycester Coltman peels back the Cold War rhetoric and portrays the Cuban revolutionary in his true colours in The Real Fidel Castro (Yale University Press, £25). Jonathan Schell examines the ramifications of 20th century weapons of mass destruction and the collapse of the ABM treaty on the next millennium in The Unfinished Twentieth Century (Verso, £8).

In The Iraq War: A Military History (Harvard University Press, £16.95) Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr. look at developments in the American military since 1991 and show how the Iraq war inspired a new ‘American way of war’.

In his thought-provoking Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq (Verso, £13), Tariq Ali describes Iraq’s attempts to resist imperial invasion in the past. He examines Iraqi politics and assesses the impact of American imperialism, putting into context recent events, which have greatly affected international relations.

David C. Wills’ The First War on Terrorism: Counter-terrorism Policy during the Reagan Administration (Rowman & Littlefield, £16) shows how the governmental decision-making process hindered the formation of a consistent plan of action to tackle terrorism.

The life and achievements of one of America’s most influential post-war diplomats are examined in Ellsworth Bunker: Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk (UNC Press, $34.95) by Howard B. Schaffer.

Die If You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century (Macmillan, £25), is the last of John Hemming’s trilogy on Brazilian Indians, and looks at the effects that ‘civilised’ invaders had on the indigenous peoples of South America.

Encyclopaedia of Wars (Eurospan, £228.50) by Axelrod and Phillips is an ambitious study of significant conflicts, wars and revolutions from 3500 BC to the present day.

Setting out to answer the topical question ‘how useful is intelligence in war?’, John Keegan offers a new history of war through the prism of intelligence in Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (Hutchinson, £25).

In Violence: Terrorism, Genocide, War (Granta Books, £17.99, trans. Anthea Bell) the German sociologist, Wolfgang Sofsky, offers explanations as to why humans have been attracted towards violence through the ages.

General History

Wolfgang Schivelbusch looks at the effect of defeat on nations, looking at events spanning the fall of Troy to September 11th, 2001, in The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (Granta Books, £20, trans. Jefferson Chase).

In Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory and Representation (University of Wales Press, £35; £16.99) Angus Calder examines the representation of war through the ages and shows how received myths have influenced subsequent interpretations of conflict.

Brian Hanley’s A Guide to Irish Military Heritage (Four Courts Press, €45/£25; €19/£12.95) offers an appraisal of archives and institutions specialising in military history.

Firearms: A Global History to 1700 by Kenneth Chase (Cambridge, £25) is a history of firearms across the world from the time of their invention in China to the time when European firearms had become superior. It asks how the Europeans perfected firearms when it was the Chinese who had invented them,

Starting with the Bible, then moving on to the 18th century garden and the Romantic forest, Richard Hayman shows how deforestation and urbanisation have shaped our attitudes to Nature in Trees: Woodlands and Civilisations (Hambledon and London, £19.95)

A new edition of J.H. Plumb’s classic text of 1969 on the ways in which humanity has moulded the past to the benefit of modern institutions, Death of the Past (Palgrave Macmillan,  £10.99) is supplemented with an introduction by Niall Ferguson and a foreword by Simon Schama.

Women’s History As Scientists: A Guide to the Debates by Leigh Whaley is part of the ‘Controversies in Science series’ (Eurospan, £64.95). It looks at women’s education and the debates surrounding women’s aptitude for  science.

The Body in the Library: A Literary History of Modern Medicine (Verso, £16) edited by Iain Bamforth is a highly entertaining and informative account not only of the development of medical practice but also a study of the works of doctor-writers past and present.

Robin Blackburn examines the history of life insurance since the French Revolution in Banking on Death; Or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions (Verso, £12).

Jeremy Black considers the way in which mapmaking was used not only to gain a greater understanding of the world, but also to create a sense of nationhood, in the lavish production Visions of the World: A History of Maps (Mitchell Beazley, £25).

Imagined Corners: Exploring the World’s First Atlas , by Paul Binding (Headline Books, £25) is a sumptuous study of the Theatrum orbis terrarum, published by Abraham Ortelius in 1570.

The Art of the Sea Chart: The Illustrated History of Nautical Maps and Navigational Charts (Conway Maritime Press, £30) by John Blake is an account of seafaring through the centuries, looking at the journeys taken by European explorers to new lands: Africa, India and the Arctic.

In Feast: A History of Grand Eating (Pimlico, £9.99) Roy Strong looks at the social function of food and considers some of the stranger practices associated with eating that evolved over five millennia.

Taking a more hands-on approach, the British Museum’s Festive Feasts Cookbook , by Michelle Berriedale-Johnson (14.99) offers fifty recreated recipes, modernised and tested, with ten historical feasts, ranging from the days of Lucrezia Borgia to Hiawatha and the Aztecs.

H.A. Meek’s The Synagogue (Phaidon, £19.95) examines the building’s role as a place of worship and a haven during times of persecution.

Alan Bray’s The Friend (University of Chicago Press, £28) explores the changing nature of male friendship in England since AD 1000, questioning the emphasis placed by historians of sexuality on the homoerotic aspects of companionship.

In Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press,  £22.95) Louis Crompton looks at the lives and works of men and women in the West and the East, who were persecuted for their sexuality.

Simon Barton’s History of Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, £42.50; £13.99) is a broad-based account of Spain’s history to the present.

In the revised edition of Genealogy for Beginners (Phillimore & Co., £8.99) Karin Proudfoot covers the various sources of information and highlights pitfalls in researching family history.

Tony Robinson’s In Search of British Heroes (Channel 4 Books, £18.99) examines the adventures of Boudicca, Macbeth, King Harold, Robin Hood and William Wallace. Robinson invites the reader to ‘step back in time’ and revisit sites where villages once stood and where battles were fought.

In Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Wright Brothers to the Space Age (Norton History Titles, £22.95) Tom D. Crouch considers the ramifications of the invention of flight on people, society and international relations.

David Howell tells the story of one of the three great agricultural societies in Britain in Taking Stock: The Centenary History of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society (University of Wales Press, £19.95).