Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) clearly did not regard Northern Ireland as a top priority; in fact, she would have preferred not to have to deal with the troubled region at all. Nevertheless, as Kelly (Liverpool Hope Univ., UK) argues in this excellent history of Thatcher's policy in Northern Ireland, she not only frequently found herself dealing with Irish matters but was also forced to move beyond her comfort zone in the direction of peace. Thatcher was bitterly hated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and many Catholics and Protestant Unionists felt betrayed by her, especially when she negotiated the Anglo-Irish Agreement with the Republic of Ireland in 1985. Using previously unreleased documents, Kelly reveals Thatcher's willingness to open diplomatic back channels to the PIRA. Thatcher lost two of her closest ministers to PIRA bombings and almost lost her own life in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing. Nonetheless, her ministers Tom King and Peter Brooke pursued policies that helped lay the groundwork for devolution and the end of the Troubles. This even-handed treatment of Thatcher's policy in Northern Ireland is likely to be the definitive account of the subject for years to come.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

The ocean voyages endured by 2 million Irish escaping the Great Famine receive comparatively limited coverage in the historical literature. McMahon (Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas) fills this gap with a signal contribution to Irish, Irish-North American, and Irish-Australian historical studies and to global Irish studies in general. The Coffin Ship frames the voyage from Ireland to Liverpool, the US, Canada, or Australia as a crucial dimension of Famine and broader modern Irish and diasporic histories. Emigrants fleeing Ireland in the 1840s or early 1850s exercised considerable agency in forging key relationships with loved ones left behind and new communities at their journeys' end. These transoceanic connections strengthened emigrants' chances of survival on board and their prospects in often unwelcome circumstances in far-flung points of disembarkation. Mining a wealth of emigrant correspondence and contemporary source material to document the journey from cottier cabin to shipboard berth, McMahon's scholarly account transports readers on the voyage that often represented the last hope of survival for so many emigrants. His affecting depictions of Famine emigration bear the imprint of those who endured these voyages. This compelling, accessible history of a central point of Irish and diasporic history makes a welcome addition to the shelves of scholars and general readers alike.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Though five academic biographies of Oliver Cromwell have appeared since 1991, this new study by Hutton (Bristol Univ., UK), the first of two volumes, is most welcome. Hutton's effort to contextualize Cromwell demystifies and yet complicates the man about whom little is known until he reached the age of 40. The "prehistoric Cromwell," as Hutton refers to him, is revealed as "an unambitious individual with limited horizons." Indeed, Hutton demonstrates that Cromwell had little interest in national politics until the 1630s. What changed this unpromising minor gentleman into the all-victorious general who crushed royalist forces at Naseby and Langport? Hutton--like other biographers--attributes this transformation to Cromwell's religious conversion at the hands of a Puritan preacher in 1638. Thereafter, he identified with those who favored removing the Catholic features from the Church of England and supported the "Junto," the aristocrats who marshaled political and military power to resist the king. Hutton admires his subject's agile mind, courage, and devotion but deplores Cromwell's self-seeking and dishonesty. In truth, the portrait found here aligns more closely with Edward Hyde's depiction of Cromwell as a "brave, bad man" than as a Puritan saint.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Bar-Haim (sociology, Univ. of Essex, UK) fleshes out an important theme in modern British historiography--how Britain, for so long a colonial and paternalistic country, developed a strong sense of maternalistic values that influenced public welfare policy in the 20th century. The author focuses on the influence of British psychoanalysts, such as Michael Balint, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and John Bowlby, who during and after the interwar periods turned the European psychology of Sandor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud into British concepts of nurturing and mothering that would strengthen the British social body, especially through feminism and medicine. The book is grounded in an impressive bibliography and extensive chapter notes and makes a solid contribution to understandings of British social welfare as well as to the ongoing investigation of British anti-colonialism in the 20th century. This book fits with the works of Seth Koven, Sonya Rose, Carolyn Steedman, and Anne Digby and should be in all libraries concerned with British social history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Though the title of this valuable work on English agricultural history might be a bit misleading--nearly everyone recognizes the revolutionary changes of the WW II era and its aftermath--what is more revolutionary is the authors' use of the Farm Management Survey archive, a treasure trove of accounts by farmers and others directly impacted by this agricultural transformation. The archive shapes this book in powerful ways, evident in the chronology and emphasis on animal husbandry. Most important, the archive lends critical evidence and subtlety to the usual analysis of policy, technology, and the travails of effectively implementing change. By complicating the statistical story supplemented by the usual government employees' self-interested reports, self-interested farmers' accounts provide a refreshing view of the revolutionary changes taking place from a generally nonrevolutionary perspective. Those farmers are hardly uniform or consistent in their recorded views, lending credibility to the risks of agricultural innovation that readers will find convincing. Readers unfamiliar with agricultural policy or history might be put off by the use of acronyms and a confusing lack of definition for commonly used terms (e.g., silage, cowsheds), but this reviewer hopes this excellent and coherent volume will reach a broad audience.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduate through faculty; professionals.

This is a wonderful synthesis of the scholarship on Scottish women's and gender history from the last 30 years and beyond. Although Knox (Univ. of St Andrews, UK) has done extensive primary research in the field, this is secondary scholarship at its best. With chapters on family and household, marriage and motherhood, women in the workplace, women and politics, sexuality, religion, and crime, the coverage is excellent given the occasionally limited existing scholarship on women in Scotland. The study extends beyond its stated limits and includes examples from before 1700 and often completes examinations by bringing them up to 2020. Knox establishes a more nuanced view of women of all classes and economic statuses over the course of 300 years and the entirety of Scotland. To have many of the facts and data available from a broad swath of scholarship in one volume makes this enormously valuable, yet merely recovering the past lives of women in Scotland is not the sole objective. The text strives to explain how gendering creates inequalities and disadvantages in a patriarchal society. The citations for each chapter are stunningly thorough, making them an invaluable resource.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.