Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme will broadly appeal to those who study the Middle Ages as well as those interested in human concepts of time and their representations in artwork. Adler (literature, Sarah Lawrence College) and Strohm (emer., humanities, Columbia Univ.) are both Chaucer scholars, and Adler has written previously about Chaucer's views of time. The authors take readers on a full tour of the many ways medieval people conceived of and measured time, including their use of the liturgical day and year; the seasons; the planets; regnal years; and a variety of instruments including sundials, astrolabes, and mechanical clocks. Readers also have a chance to see how important figures like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe thought about their experiences with time. The final chapters about the stages of human life and the expectation of the end times are particularly moving. One of the book's many charms is its wide range of beautiful, full-color illustrations of the concepts involved, drawn from manuscripts, stained glass windows, and frescoes. This engaging work will interest students and scholars alike.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

There are a vast number of books on the history of the British Empire, some cited in this tome. Surveys of this history often fixate on the political (and economic) aspects of colonialism, to the detriment of the cultural and social impacts. Works by postcolonialists themselves often blindly emphasize Indigenous agency. Heartfield, a journalist and activist who has written 16 books, including the well-received The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1836-1956 (CH, Jun'17, 54-4874), once stood as a Brexit candidate for the European Parliament and was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. As befitting Heartfield's leftist orientation, this volume emphasizes the economic underpinnings of imperialism and neocolonialism but in a sophisticated analysis that hearkens back to an older, but now passed and passe, generation of historians who saw imperialism as highly variegated and driven at different times for good and evil by different impulses, both domestic and foreign. This well-researched, profusely illustrated, and welcomed volume can serve in an undergraduate course; however, the print price might be out of range for most students (though the ebook price is more reasonable).Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Traders in Men is perhaps one of the most concise, poignant, and accurate titles for a book on British merchants and the transformation of the transatlantic slave trade. Radburn (Lancaster Univ., UK), a prolific author who has written often about the transatlantic slave trade, masterfully writes about central players in Britain's slave trade: the merchants. Focusing on this large collective of British traders, he shows how they propelled the growth of the slave trade during the 18th century and expanded its geography by circumventing Portugal's control of the trade. By enslaving new people in Africa, expanding into new markets in the Americas north of the equator, and trading directly with Africans from their ships rather than from coastal forts or factories, British merchants bounded ahead of Portuguese traders by the mid-18th century to dominate the trade. Expertly researched and well written, this book puts a face to the often faceless capitalists who directed the enslavement, transportation, and commodification of millions of Africans. Using an "Atlantic-wide view," Radburn shows that British merchants, through a complex network of slaving routes and economic self-interest, brought the Atlantic world together (p. 10).Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Orme (emer., Exeter Univ., UK), the author of pioneering books about schools and childhood in the Middle Ages, has produced a superb book about Tudor children. His achievement is even more impressive given the scarcity of sources, especially for the children of non-elites, which means "a clear and complete understanding often eludes us" (p. 225). Indeed, the experience of childhood differed greatly according to status. Despite the lack of sources, however, Orme provides illuminating chapters on birth and infancy, play, religion, school, and growing up. Much more evidence is available for education and the role of religion in children's lives. Of the latter, he concludes there was no standard childhood experience and that many traditional expectations and rituals survived the Reformation. Orme distinguishes between precept and practice: the demands of even a deeply religious society might be ignored in some cases, as with the 1549 requirement of catechism classes for the young. Regarding education, his research often uncovers the unexpected: in 1570, a census of the poor in Norwich reveals that perhaps one-sixth of children of school age received some formal education. However, most of his examples inevitably come from noble, gentry, and royal sources.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Ward (Univ. of Copenhagen, Denmark) explores how Britain's retreat from its colonies after 1945 led to the dissolution of a shared British identity across the globe and within the UK itself. Drawing on extensive research in archives, newspapers, memoirs, and numerous scholarly sources, he sketches the growth of ideas and the realities of a global Britain and Britishness from the 17th century through WW II, before turning to his main focus: developments across the Commonwealth in the four decades after 1945 as decolonization proceeded. He examines the official use of the word British; the meaning of equal British subjecthood for West Indian, South Asian, and African migrants; the challenge to concepts of British constitutional liberties and justice in South Africa and Rhodesia as a new international order emerged; and the unraveling of imperial political, economic, and cultural ties. Ward suggests that Britain's retreat from global empire also had repercussions for the four nations of the British Isles by the late 1960s, aligning the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the electoral success of the nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland with decolonization and the erosion of Britishness. An original, thought-provoking contribution to the study of British history, imperialism, and national identity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.