Books and Reviews

Review Essay | The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism by Thomas Frank

Given the alarming recent support for reactionary Right-wing populist politicians around the world, discussions of populism as a cultural-political phenomenon have become increasingly important. In this detailed review, Andrew Urie reviews Thomas Frank’s book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (2020), which provides an engaging history of American populism and its Left-wing potential.

Thomas Frank has long been one […]

March 10th, 2021|Uncategorized|1 Comment|
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Review Essay | Right to Mourn: Trauma, Empathy, and Korean War Memorials by Suhi Choi

In the post-World War era, an increasing number of western democracies have sought to achieve legitimacy by acknowledging the violence tainting their historic pasts. These admissions have resulted in the creation of reconcilliation commissions, courts prosecuting war criminals, restitution to the victims of conflict, and the construction of memorials. Here, Akshita Mathur reviews Suhi Choi’s ‘Right to Mourn’ – […]

September 17th, 2020|Uncategorized|0 Comments|
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Review Essay | Dalit: A Quest for Dignity

In this essay Arushi Vats reviews ‘Dalit: A Quest for Dignity’, published in 2018 by the Nepal Picture Library. The work is a unique collection of photographs that seek to capture the lives of the Dalit populace, an ostracised minority, over six decades in Nepal. Vats analyses the interaction between readers, photographers and the subjects of the compendium, musing […]

August 27th, 2020|Uncategorized|0 Comments|
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Jaipur Literature Festival 2019 Interview: Sven Beckert’s ‘Empire of Cotton’

During the 2019 ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, Tom Wilkinson (LSE) caught up with Laird Bell Professor Sven Beckert (Harvard University) to discuss his award-winning book Empire of Cotton: A Global History and the historic place of South Asia in the global cotton economy.
 

TW: Your book looks at 5,000 years of history. Could you give me a brief overview of the cotton economy in South Asia?

SB: The […]

December 10th, 2019|Uncategorized|0 Comments|
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In Conversation: Professor David Stevenson

As part of the new LSE History podcast series, Professor David Stevenson spoke with LSE PhD student Artemis Photiadou on his latest book 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution, discussing why the First World War lasted as long as it did, why it ended, and why 1917 is a pivotal year. This is the first installment of the International History Blog’s In […]

July 15th, 2019|Uncategorized|0 Comments|
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Book Review | American Empire: A Global History by A.G. Hopkins

Distinctive, but not exceptional, is the theme of A.G. Hopkins’ new tome American Empire: A Global History. For a book 980 pages long, this tagline may sound like a poor return on the reader’s investment. Such anxiety, however, is consistently expelled by the way in which Hopkins presents what Victor Lieberman has called in another context, “strange parallels”. These comparisons […]

February 25th, 2019|Uncategorized|0 Comments|
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Book Review | Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment by Francis Fukuyama

It is doubtful whether any author better encapsulates the optimism of liberal democrats after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 than Francis Fukuyama. His book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), was an unexpected international phenomenon, sparking whiggish debates about the direction of history, from Harvard to LSE to Tokyo.

That he has now published […]

November 14th, 2018|Uncategorized|1 Comment|
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Conflict and Identity in Europe since the 18th Century

The Department of International History research cluster ‘Conflict and Identity in Europe since the Eighteenth Century’ met on Thursday 23 November to discuss The Internationalists: And Their Plan to Outlaw War (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2017), a new book by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, both of whom are scholars of international law at Yale University. […]

December 12th, 2017|Uncategorized|0 Comments|
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