Original Reviews

Michael Crawford presents the compelling story of colonial manumission movements among North Carolina Quakers. Using primary documents, Crawford shows how the consequences of this group’s antislavery activism radiated out from a few individuals to the region, the state, and, eventually, the nation. Through a collection of diaries, petitions, legislative debates, and letters, well-known as well [...]

[Read more →]

Antimatter is not an easy concept to grasp. Frank Close’s book explores this strange mirror world, where particles have identical yet opposite properties to those that make up the familiar matter we encounter everyday. Should matter and antimatter meet, the resulting flash of blinding energy would make even thermonuclear explosions look feeble by comparison. Yet at one time antimatter [...]

[Read more →]

This book looks at how the law responds to that American dream of power and influence beyond the grave. That is particularly so when it comes to property interests. The American dead have greater control of their wealth than elsewhere in the world, and that influence from beyond the grave is growing. Roy Madoff explains [...]

[Read more →]

In order to understand the history of the ‘great writ’ better, Paul Halliday has gone beyond the standard commentaries of William Blackstone and Edward Coke. He has examined more than eleven thousand habeas corpus cases from 1500 to 1800 in English archives. They tell a different story. If habeas corpus is a tool of judicial [...]

[Read more →]

Grant Wood’s paintings are celebrated for having the common touch. His simplicity was not an affectation, but said to be the very essence of his character. In this new biography of one of America’s most acclaimed regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed as anything but plain, or simple. American Gothic – perhaps his most famous [...]

[Read more →]

The period between the two world wars was a time of turbulent political change. Suffragists, labor radicals, demagogues, and others competed to be heard and their clamor is well-known. One group of activists that has yet to be closely examined by historians is World War I veterans. Stephen R. Ortiz reveals that in the years [...]

[Read more →]

Brands opens with Hiroshima and closes in the present. The national confidence and social unity at the end of World War II and the present cultural antagonisms and political polarity, bracket Brands’ one-volume history. He describes cold war foreign policy, the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam civil war, the expansion of [...]

[Read more →]

This is a fascinating analysis of global population trends and how they have both shaped, and been shaped by, political and cultural shifts. We seem to have worried alternatively by the treat of over population and population decline. The later situation is closely associated with eugenics and a ‘fall of civilization.’ Fred Pearce starts with [...]

[Read more →]

Social insects live in hives, mounds, colonies, and swarms. Their complex systems of engagement and collective decision-making, Peter Miller contends, can suggest reasonable ways of going about discussing, perhaps resolving group dilemmas. The sophisticated system of decentralized interdependence exhibited by termites may have some bearing on how humans might respond to emergencies. Insects, birds, and [...]

[Read more →]

While the role of organized religion in the public square is well-trammeled, Ian Buruma adds some thoughtful political and cultural analyses drawn from the North America, Europe, and Asia. The traditions that create separate spheres for religious and political authority here is in many different than the role of religion in the politics of China [...]

[Read more →]