Reviews
A Crusade by Any Other Name….
Sometimes the name you give to an historical event says a lot about where you stand in relation to that event. Is it the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression? The Sepoy Rebellion, the first Indian war of independence, or (my personal choice) the violence of 1857? Other times, what you call an…
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White Gold: Sugar in the New World
In The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies Matthew Parker, author of Panama Fever and Monte Cassino: The Hardest Fought Battle of World War II, uses the rise and fall of the sugar dynasties of the West Indies as a framework for the intertwined histories of sugar, slavery, the industrial…
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Slouching Toward Jerusalem
I’ve been fascinated by the Crusades for several years now. Not surprising, I suppose, given my basic interest in the times and places where two cultures touch (or in the case of the Crusades, whack at) each other and change. I’ve read accounts of what the Crusades looked like from the Muslim perspective. (Barbarian…
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