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THE CITY ON THE THAMES

THE CREATION OF A WORLD CAPITAL: A HISTORY OF LONDON

A mostly delightful love letter to a great city.

The ageless genre of city histories receives a fine addition.

Though London was the biggest city in the world in the 19th century, it does not even make the top 10 today. Jenkins, a lifelong Londoner who served as the editor of Evening Standard and the Times and is now a columnist at the Guardian, clearly loves his home city, and he leavens his enthusiasm with expertise and a highly critical eye. Beginning as Londinium, founded after the 43 C.E. Roman invasion, by the end of the century, it was a cosmopolitan city of 60,000. It nearly disappeared after Rome withdrew in 410 but pulled itself together after two centuries and prospered as a trading center, surviving the black plague and a civil war to become a European power by 1500. Henry VIII’s looting of the church produced vast wealth, and Elizabeth’s disinterest in aggressive wars did nothing to discourage London’s rise to “Europe’s premier financial centre.” Until he reaches the middle of the 17th century, Jenkins delivers traditional history, mixing politics, culture, and trade. City planning and architecture take a back seat because little that was built still exists. Thereafter, the author takes his love of the city literally by concentrating on city government, delving heavily into the backgrounds of neighborhoods, palaces, squares, monuments, roads, and infrastructure. Londoners and frequent visitors will relish his expert, opinionated, and sometimes highly unflattering picture. While many European cities that rebuilt after World War II carefully preserved their historical gems, Britain did no such thing, giving builders carte blanche. As a result, “they inflicted greater destruction on London…than all Hitler’s bombs.” Readers unfamiliar with the city’s geography will appreciate the generous maps and illustrations but may feel the urge to skim many detailed accounts of local property development.

A mostly delightful love letter to a great city.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-64313-552-6

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020

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ON JUNETEENTH

A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.

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The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.

Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.

A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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