Prior to publishing my previous blog post on one magazine’s struggle with gender equality, I showed the accompanying visualisation to a small number of reviewers. On more than one occasion some variation of the following was raised: what if the lack of female-authored history books reviewed in this magazine is due to the fact that not a lot of history books by women were published last year? Sure, only 22% of the books reviewed listed a woman as least one of the authors, but what if only 22% of books published last year had a woman involved?
It’s an interesting point, though my immediate reaction is to question whether the share of female-authored history books reviewed in the magazine has to reflect the share of female-authored history books in general. If book reviews play some sort of role in determining the popularity of books, couldn’t an example be set here by reviewing as many books authored by women as by men? And that aside, what does the evidence show? Moreover, where does one even obtain such evidence from in the first place?
The answer to the second question wasn’t difficult to answer – the British Library of course! The British Library (BL) is a legal deposit, meaning that “by law, a copy of every UK print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers” (see their website for more information about this), and there’s a team of people at the BL who look after the information about these books, even releasing the data to anyone with an interest in looking at it. Well, I happen to be one of those people and I contacted the BL to ask if they could provide me with data on every history book published in the UK over a given 12-month period; after some back-and-forth via email we settled on 2015, the nearest full calendar year for which they had complete data on book publications.
The full details of this dataset and what it shows is something I want to explore in another blog post. For now, I instead want to draw attention to some of the history books published in 2015 that were (co-)authored or (co-)edited by women – something that’s been easy to do with the availability of this dataset. I’ve chosen 20 books but, as the title of this post indicates, there were in fact far more available – over a thousand in fact.
This alone I think invalidates any argument about how a larger share of history books authored by men makes it so difficult to find enough history books written by women – the volume of them written by women (in the UK alone) is phenomenal, and I was truly spoilt for choice here. In each case below I’ve used the blurb from Amazon, and I’ve linked to each book’s page on Amazon too if any of you are encouraged to make a purchase or two (although purchases from well-stocked brick-and-mortar stores is always a good thing too):
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. The Cambridge World History.
The Cambridge World History is an authoritative new overview of the dynamic field of world history. It covers the whole of human history, not simply history since the development of written records, in an expanded time frame that represents the latest thinking in world and global history. With over two hundred essays, it is the most comprehensive account yet of the human past, and it draws on a broad international pool of leading academics from a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Reflecting the increasing awareness that world history can be examined through many different approaches and at varying geographic and chronological scales, each volume offers regional, topical, and comparative essays alongside case studies that provide depth of coverage to go with the breadth of vision that is the distinguishing characteristic of world history.
Carson, Eleo. Dearest Margarita: An Edwardian Love Story in Postcards
In 1900, aged twenty and travelling from Havana to Europe, Margarita Johnson met and fell in love with the dashing gold prospector Charles Lumb. Her father disapproved, and after three years of secret postcards, the couple eloped to London. Cut out of her father’s will, Margarita was never welcomed again in Havana.
Margarita treasured her postcards from Charles, her family and friends, who wrote from England America and Europe. They remained with her until she died in 1959. Years later they were found by her granddaughter, tucked away in a cubby hole, and are here seen for the first time.
Loveman, Kate. Samuel Pepys and his Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660-1703
Samuel Pepys was a great collector of books, news, and gossip. This study uses his surviving papers to examine reading practices, collecting, and the exchange of information in the late seventeenth century. Offering the first extensive history of reading during the Restoration, it traces developments in the book trade and news transmission at a time when England was the scene of dramatic political and religious upheavals. The investigation goes beyond Pepys’s famous diary of the 1660s, employing a variety of sources to explore the role that reading played in Pepys’s life and in the lives of his contemporaries. It begins by examining what it meant to be a reader in Restoration London: the skills, the people, and the places involved. Pepys’s wide-ranging interests serve as starting points for considering news exchange and the reception of major literary genres in the Restoration. Particular attention is given to conduct books, histories, religious works, and recreational reading (romances, drama, and novels). The appeal that these works held for readers was not always what we might expect -or, indeed, what the authors and publishers had expected. Additional chapters explore the social interactions surrounding information gathering: the ways people acquired oral and written news in London; the experience of book-buying; and the acquisition of manuscript and print through social networks. Analysed alongside other records, Pepys’s papers provide unrivalled insights into literary and cultural developments in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Fehrenbach, Heide. Humanitarian Photography: A History
For well over a century, humanitarians and their organizations have used photographic imagery and the latest media technologies to raise public awareness and funds to alleviate human suffering. This volume examines the historical evolution of what we today call ‘humanitarian photography’ – the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries – and asks how we can account for the shift from the fitful and debated use of photography for humanitarian purposes in the late nineteenth century to our current situation in which photographers market themselves as ‘humanitarian photographers’. This book is the first to investigate how humanitarian photography emerged and how it operated in diverse political, institutional, and social contexts, bringing together more than a dozen scholars working on the history of humanitarianism, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations, and visual culture in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.
Leff, Lisa Moses. The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust
Born into poverty in Russian Poland in 1911, Zosa Szajkowski (Shy-KOV-ski) was a self-made man who managed to make a life for himself as an intellectual, first as a journalist in 1930s Paris, and then, after a harrowing escape to New York in 1941, as a scholar. Although he never taught at a university or even earned a PhD, Szajkowski became one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of the Jews in modern France, publishing in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. His work opened up new ways of thinking about Jewish emancipation, economic and social modernization, and the rise of modern anti-Semitism.
But beneath Szajkowski’s scholarly success lay a shameful secret. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the scholar stole tens of thousands of archival documents related to French Jewish history from public archives and private synagogue collections in France and moved them, illicitly, to New York. There, he used them as the basis for his pathbreaking articles. Eventually, he sold them, piecemeal, to American and Israeli research libraries, where they still remain today.
Why did this respectable historian become an archive thief? And why did librarians in the United States and Israel buy these materials from him, turning a blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore? These are the questions that motivate this gripping tale. Throughout, it is clear that all involved―perpetrator, victims, and buyers―saw what Szajkowski was doing through the prism of the Holocaust. The buyers shared a desire to save these precious remnants of the European Jewish past, left behind on a continent where six million Jews had just been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. The scholars who read Szajkowski’s studies, based largely on the documents he had stolen, saw the treasures as offering an unparalleled window into the history that led to that catastrophe. And the Jewish caretakers of many of the institutions Szajkowski robbed in France saw the losses as a sign of their difficulties reconstructing their community after the Holocaust, when the balance of power in the Jewish world was shifting away from Europe to new centers in America and Israel.
Based on painstaking research, Lisa Leff reconstructs Szajkowski’s story in all its ambiguity by taking us backstage at the archives, revealing the powerful ideological, economic and scientific forces that made Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply than ever before about preserving the remnants of their past.
Chezzi, Bruna. Italians in Wales and their Cultural Representations, 1920s-2010s
Italian immigrants began to settle in Wales at the turn of the 19th century, opening hundreds of coffee shops, particularly in the South Wales Valleys. Despite this, such immigrants remain a largely unexplored case study in the history of Italian immigration to the UK. This book uses a variety of unexplored sources, and engages with the broader academic debate on migration, identity, and the trans-generational transmission of memory, to describe the emergence of Welsh-Italian narratives and the formation of a distinctive, yet complex, Welsh-Italian identity. It follows a chronological journey, moving from the interwar period, a time in which Italians in Wales were generally regarded as fully established and integrated, through to the Second World War, a time when Italian identity became problematic and resulted in nearly seventy years of ‘silencing’, up until the first decade of the 21th century, where a mixture of commemorative events and cultural initiatives prompted the emergence of Welsh-Italian narratives. The book begins by studying photographic representations of Italians in Wales during the interwar period, using photographs available in local history books, private collections and history books. The analysis of the photographic material draws from the work of scholars such as Sontag, Noble, Hirsh and Bate on photo-textual analysis, to show how photographs can reveal understudied, yet important, aspects of Italian migrant identity and of the relationship with the host community in the period that preceded the Second World War. The book then examines how the events of the Second World War destabilised the images of family, sociability and integration suggested by these photographs, and how such events aggravated tensions between host and migrant cultures. It continues by investigating recent Welsh-Italian texts where, in revisiting the past and the experience of their ancestors, the authors bring different circumstances and personal factors into play determining the degree to which they reconcile their dual identity. It concludes with a comparison between these ‘narratives of belonging’ and the representation of the Italian migrant experience in Anglo-Welsh literature.
De Schaepdrijver, Sophie. Gabrielle Petit: The Death and Life of a Female Spy in the First World War
In central Brussels stands a statue of a young woman. Built in 1923, it is the first monument to a working-class woman in European history. Her name was Gabrielle Petit. History has forgotten Petit, an ambitious and patriotic Belgian, executed by firing squad in 1916 for her role as an intelligence agent for the British Army. After the First World War she was celebrated as an example of stern endeavour, but a hundred years later her memory has faded.
In the first part of this historical biography Sophie De Schaepdrijver uses Petit’s life to explore gender, class and heroism in the context of occupied Europe. Petit’s experiences reveal the reality of civilian engagement under military occupation and the emergence of modern espionage. The second part of the book focuses on the legacy and cultural memory of Petit and the First World War. By analysing Petit’s representation in ceremony, discourse and popular culture De Schaepdrijver expands our understanding of remembrance across the 20th century.
Doran, Susan. Elizabeth I and Her Circle
This is the story of Elizabeth I’s inner circle and the crucial human relationships which lay at the heart of her personal and political life. Using a wide range of original sources – including private letters, portraits, verse, drama, and state papers – Susan Doran provides a vivid and often dramatic account of political life in Elizabethan England and the queen at its centre, offering a deeper insight into Elizabeth’s emotional and political conduct – and challenging many of the popular myths that have grown up around her.
It is a story replete with fascinating questions. What was the true nature of Elizabeth’s relationship with her father, Henry VIII, especially after his execution of her mother? How close was she to her half-brother Edward VI – and were relations with her half-sister Mary really as poisonous as is popularly assumed? And what of her relationship with her Stewart cousins, most famously with Mary Queen of Scots, executed on Elizabeth’s orders in 1587, but also with Mary’s son James VI of Scotland, later to succeed Elizabeth as her chosen successor?
Elizabeth’s relations with her family were crucial, but just as crucial were her relations with her courtiers and her councillors. Here again, the story raises a host of fascinating questions. Was the queen really sexually jealous of her maids of honour? Did physically attractive male favourties dominate her court? What does her long and intimate relationship with the Earl of Leicester reveal about her character, personality, and attitude to marriage? What can the fall of Essex tell us about Elizabeth’s political management in the final years of her reign? And what was the true nature of her personal and political relationship with influential and long-serving councillors such as the Cecils and Sir Francis Walsingham? And how did courtiers and councillors deal with their demanding royal mistress?
Finn, Margot. Smith, Kate. New Paths to Public Histories
New Paths to Public Histories challenges readers to consider historical research as a collaborative pursuit enacted across a range of individuals from different backgrounds and institutions. It argues that research communities can benefit from recognizing and strengthening the ways in which they work with others.
Bivins, Roberta. Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration, and the NHS in Post War Britain
It was only a coincidence that the NHS and the Empire Windrush (a ship carrying 492 migrants from Britain’s West Indian colonies) arrived together. On 22 June 1948, as the ship’s passengers disembarked, frantic preparations were already underway for 5 July, the Appointed Day when the nation’s new National Health Service would first open its doors. The relationship between immigration and the NHS rapidly attained – and has enduringly retained – notable political and cultural significance.
Both the Appointed Day and the post-war arrival of colonial and Commonwealth immigrants heralded transformative change. Together, they reshaped daily life in Britain and notions of ‘Britishness’ alike. Yet the reciprocal impacts of post-war immigration and medicine in post-war Britain have yet to be explored. Contagious Communities casts new light on a period which is beginning to attract significant historical interest. Roberta Bivins draws attention to the importance – but also the limitations – of medical knowledge, approaches, and professionals in mediating post-war British responses to race, ethnicity, and the emergence of new and distinctive ethnic communities. By presenting a wealth of newly available or previously ignored archival evidence, she interrogates and re-balances the political history of Britain’s response to New Commonwealth immigration. Contagious Communities uses a set of linked case-studies to map the persistence of ‘race’ in British culture and medicine alike; the limits of belonging in a multi-ethnic welfare state; and the emergence of new and resolutely ‘unimagined’ communities of patients, researchers, clinicians, policy-makers, and citizens within the medical state and its global contact zones.
Roberts, Geraldine. The Angel and the Cad: Love, Loss and Scandal in Regency England
A narrative history rich with romance and tragedy, The Angel and the Cad is the story of the high society scandal that gripped Regency England. The day she turned 16, Catherine Tylney Long became the wealthiest heiress in England and the public found their ‘angel’. Witty, wealthy and beautiful, Catherine was the most eligible of young ladies and was courted by royalty but, ignoring the warnings of her closest confidantes, she married for love. Her choice of husband was the charming but feckless dandy William Wellesley Pole, nephew of the Duke of Wellington. The pair excited the public’s interest on an unprecedented scale with gossip columns reporting every detail of their magnificent home in Wanstead, along with their honeymoon of royal fetes, dinners and parties. But their happiness was short-lived and just a decade later William had frittered away Catherine’s inheritance, even selling off her beloved Wanstead House brick by brick, and their marriage ended in a cruel and dramatic divorce and a landmark custody battle. Meticulously researched and rich with dazzling detail, The Angel and the Cad is a gripping and tragic tale of love and drama that twists and turns until the final page.
Brooks, H.E.M. Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women
Examining theatre economics, rhetorical acting, cross-dressing, the staging of ‘self’, and the alignment of motherhood and work, this book reveals how actresses drew on changing models of gender to achieve phenomenal levels of success over the eighteenth-century. By doing so it sheds new light on the cultural significance of female performance.
Hobhouse Balme, Jennifer. Agent of Peace: Emily Hobhouse and Her Courageous Attempt to End the First World War
In the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) Emily Hobhouse championed the cause of the women and children herded into camps by Kitchener’s army. By 1914, a confirmed pacifist, she felt passionately that civilians suffered more than combatants and she was anxious for a negotiated peace. Her ‘Open Christmas Letter’ of January 1915, calling for an end to hostilities, was answered by 155 prominent pacifist and feminist German and Austrian women.
By 1916 Emily was concerned by the scale of losses at the front as well. During a visit to Berlin she met the German Foreign Secretary and came to realise that peace negotiations were possible. She put forward a plan to bring about talks, to which he agreed, but in England she was snubbed by the Foreign Office. Despite this setback, Emily continued in her mission to relieve the suffering caused by war, working tirelessly for the release of civilian prisoners and to secure better food for Belgium. The story of this extraordinary woman and her battle to secure peace is told here by her grand-niece largely through Emily’s own letter, journal and diary extracts.
Chapman, Jane, et al. Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record
Comics and the World Wars argues for the use of comics as a primary source by offering a highly original argument that such examples produced during the World Wars act as a cultural record. Recuperating currently unknown or neglected strips, this work demonstrates how these can be used for the study of both world wars. Representing the fruits of over five years team research, this book reveals how sequential illustrated narratives used humour as a coping mechanism and a way to criticise authority, promoted certain forms of behaviour and discouraged others, represented a deliberately inclusive educational strategy for reading wartime content, and became a barometer for contemporary popular thinking.
Arnold, Catharine. Globe: Life in Shakespeare’s London
The life of William Shakespeare, Britain’s greatest dramatist, was inextricably linked with the history of London. Together, the great writer and the great city came of age and confronted triumph and tragedy. Triumph came when Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, opened the Globe playhouse on Bankside in 1599, under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I. Tragedy touched the lives of many of his contemporaries, from fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe to the disgraced Earl of Essex, while London struggled against the ever-present threat of riots, rebellions and outbreaks of plague.
Globetakes its readers on a tour of London through Shakespeare’s life and work, as, in fascinating detail, Catharine Arnold tells how acting came of age. We learn about James Burbage, founder of the original Theatre in Shoreditch, who carried timbers across the Thames to build the Globe among the bear-gardens and brothels of Bankside, and of the terrible night in 1613 when the theatre caught fire during a performance of King Henry VIII. Rebuilt, the Globe continued to stand as a monument to Shakespeare’s genius until 1642 when it was destroyed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell. And finally we learn how 300 years later, Shakespeare’s Globe opened once more upon the Bankside, to great acclaim, rising like a phoenix from the flames Arnold creates a vivid portrait of Shakespeare and his London from the bard’s own plays and contemporary sources, combining a novelist’s eye for detail with a historian’s grasp of his unique contribution to the development of the English theatre. This is a portrait of Shakespeare, London, the man and the myth.
Teege, Jennifer. My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past
When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea that her life would be irrevocably altered. Recognising photos of her mother and grandmother in the book, she discovers a horrifying fact: Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant chillingly depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List – a man known and reviled the world over.
Although raised in an orphanage and eventually adopted, Teege had some contact with her biological mother and grandmother as a child. Yet neither revealed that Teege’s grandfather was the Nazi “butcher of Plaszów,” executed for crimes against humanity in 1946. The more Teege reads about Amon Goeth, the more certain she becomes: If her grandfather had met her-a black woman-he would have killed her.
Teege’s discovery sends her, at age 38, into a severe depression-and on a quest to unearth and fully comprehend her family’s haunted history. Her research takes her to Krakow – to the sites of the Jewish ghetto her grandfather ‘cleared’ in 1943 and the Plaszów concentration camp he then commanded – and back to Israel, where she herself once attended college, learned fluent Hebrew, and formed lasting friendships. Teege struggles to reconnect with her estranged mother Monika, and to accept that her beloved grandmother once lived in luxury as Amon Goeth’s mistress at Plaszów.
Teege’s story is co-written by award-winning journalist Nikola Sellmair, who also contributes a second, interwoven narrative that draws on original interviews with Teege’s family and friends and adds historical context. Ultimately, Teege’s resolute search for the truth leads her, step by step, to the possibility of her own liberation.
Dunlop, Tessa. The Bletchley Girls: War, secrecy, love and loss: the women of Bletchley Park tell their story
The Bletchley Girls weaves together the lives of fifteen women who were all selected to work in Britain’s most secret organisation – Bletchley Park. It is their story, told in their voices; Tessa met and talked to 15 veterans, often visiting them several times. Firm friendships were made as their epic journey unfolded on paper.
The scale of female involvement in Britain during the Second World War wasn’t matched in any other country. From 8 million working women just over 7000 were hand-picked to work at Bletchley Park and its outstations. There had always been girls at the Park but soon they outnumbered the men three to one.
A refugee from Belgium, a Scottish debutante, a Jewish 14-year-old, and a factory worker from Northamptonshire – the Bletchley Girls confound stereotypes. But they all have one common bond, the war and their highly confidential part in it. In the middle of the night, hunched over meaningless pieces of paper, tending mind-blowing machines, sitting listening for hours on end, theirs was invariably confusing, monotonous and meticulous work, about which they could not breathe a word.
By meeting and talking to these fascinating female secret-keepers who are still alive today, Tessa Dunlop captures their extraordinary journeys into an adult world of war, secrecy, love and loss. Through the voices of the women themselves, this is a portrait of life at Bletchley Park beyond the celebrated code-breakers, it’s the story of the girls behind Britain’s ability to consistently out-smart the enemy, and an insight into the women they have become.
Wilcox, Helen, et al. Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen
During a period when writing was often the only form of self-expression for women, Her Own Life contains extracts from the autobiographical texts of twelve seventeenth-century women addressing a wide range of issues central to their lives.
Goodman, Ruth. How to be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Everyday Life
The Tudor era encompasses some of the greatest changes in our history. But while we know about the historical dramas of the times – most notably in the court of Henry VIII – what was life really like for a commoner like you or me?
To answer this question, the renowned “method historian” and historical advisor to the BBC Ruth Goodman has slept, washed and cooked as the Tudors did – so you don’t have to! She is your expert guide to this fascinating era, drawing on years of practical historical study to show how our ancestors coped with everyday life, from how they slept to how they courted.
Using a vast range of sources, she takes you back to the time when soot was used as toothpaste and the “upper crust” of bread was served to the wealthier members of the house. Exploring how the Tudors learnt, danced and even sat and stood according to the latest fashion, she reveals what it all felt, smelt and tasted like, from morning until night.
Plum, Catherine. Antifascism After Hitler: East German Youth and Socialist Memory, 1949-1989
Antifascism After Hitler investigates the antifascist stories, memory sites and youth reception that were critical to the success of political education in East German schools and extracurricular activities. As the German Democratic Republic (GDR) promoted national identity and socialist consciousness, two of the most potent historical narratives to permeate youth education became tales of communist resistors who fought against fascism and the heroic deeds of the Red Army in World War II. These stories and iconic images illustrate the message that was presented to school-age children and adolescents in stages as they advanced through school and participated in the official communist youth organizations and other activities.
This text delivers the first comprehensive study of youth antifascism in the GDR, extending scholarship beyond the level of the state to consider the everyday contributions of local institutions and youth mentors responsible for conveying stories and commemorative practices to generations born during WWII and after the defeat of fascism. While the government sought to use educators and former resistance fighters as ideological shock troops, it could not completely dictate how these stories would be told, with memory intermediaries altering at times the narrative and message. Using a variety of primary sources including oral history interviews, the author also assesses how students viewed antifascism, with reactions ranging from strong identification to indifference and dissent. Antifascist education and commemoration were never simply state-prescribed and were not as “participation-less” as some scholars and contemporary observers claim, even as educators fought a losing battle to maintain enthusiasm.
Treigladau 