Book Reviews

From the outbreak of war in the 13 British North American colonies in 1775 to the conflicts that erupted throughout the Spanish New World colonies in the 1810s, revolutions convulsed the Atlantic World for half a century. The power and consequences...

To Nicholas Dames, the "chapter" has become a silent, invisible metronome of our lives. Beginning as an index for Latin encyclopedias and Greek legal codes, this simple tool for dividing text has spread far beyond its basic indexical function...

In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, Virginia Postrel expertly demonstrates how the history of textiles is the story of human progress. Although textiles have shaped society in many ways, their central role in the development...

Caroline Cheung, an assistant professor of Classics at Princeton University, seeks to fill a rather large gap in the scholarship of the ancient Roman wine trade by centering the storage vessels themselves, the dolia (sing. dolium). Historically...

When first picking up this book, the reader might not expect to stumble upon police reports regarding wrongful arrests of Viennese women at the turn of the century. As a contemporary reader, what is provided on the pages of Katya Motyl’s...

Martha Rampton’s two primary goals with this book were to define in specific terms what “magic” meant and to examine how that meaning changed over time. She divides the book into four parts, with the last three focusing on specific time periods...

Twilight Cities: Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean is Katherine Pangonis’s second book, with her first being Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule (2021). Twilight Cities is dedicated to the history of five prominent and "lost"...

The book begins with Alexandria's founding by Alexander the Great after he conquered the Persian Empire. Like its legendary namesake, the city was destined for fame. Its strategic and symbolic value made it a coveted prize of world conquerors...

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer is a sweeping and well-researched work that endeavours to present a coherent narrative of ancient history from its earliest beginnings to...

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper takes a refreshing approach by focusing on the lives of the women believed to be victims of the notorious killer rather than simply on their deaths. Unlike typical ripperology...