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Book Review
The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States
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...
Book Review
Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature
In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak, a medieval historian, professor at UCLA, and interpreter during the war in Yugoslavia, focuses primarily on the theory of translation. Through proposing the term "fixers," a term loosely based on its journalistic...
Book Review
The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty
Centered around the story of the Sassoons, a Jewish family in Ottoman Baghdad that spanned two continents, this book is not only a family story but also a story of global trade and global capitalism. Although different members of the Sassoon...
Book Review
Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought
In Remapping Sovereignty, David Temin discusses how Native American writers, thinkers, and activists have posited alternatives to sovereignty as the primary form of modern political organization. Arguing that sovereignty conceals destructive...
Book Review
Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain
Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain by osteoarchaeologist Alice Roberts is the second book in her trilogy that unpacks Britain’s history through skeletal remains. Following Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain...
Book Review
Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials
Ancestors: A History of Britain in Seven Burials is a focused yet detailed look at the prehistory of Britain, particularly what burials, skeletons, ancient DNA, and human remains can reveal about the long-spanning time from the Palaeolithic...
Book Review
Lyman Trumbull and the Second Founding of the United States
Rego, Professor of Politics at Messiah University, gives readers a deeper understanding of Lyman Trumbull than a simple biography would provide. While the work is biographical in following a chronology and covering the prominent moments of...
Book Review
Creating the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study
Stephen J. Shoemaker’s Creating the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study is, in brief, an argument for placing the “closure” of the Qur’an, its development into the definitive form we know today, in 8th century Iraq and Syria, as opposed to...
Book Review
A Noble Ruin: Mark Antony, Civil War, and the Collapse of the Roman Republic
Despite Tatum's best efforts, it is hard to call this book a proper biography of Mark Antony. As the subtitle suggests, Tatum attempts to chronicle Mark Antony’s life, the multiple civil wars throughout it, and the broader narrative of the...
Book Review
American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea
In framing his discussion of American exceptionalism, the author employs two methodological approaches referencing Seymour Martin Lipset, a social scientist, and Mircea Eliade, a philosopher. Lipset, the author holds, evaluated the U.S. against...
