Review of Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter
This collection of fifteen essays brings together a range of specialist academic perspectives on the remarkable cultural phenomenon that is Hamilton: an American Musical. It will be of interest to a wide range of people: fans of the show; professional scholars from a range of disciplines; and the general reader. It is an essential library purchase for anyone considering teaching courses which include this musical.
Book Review: Fighting over the Founders: How we remember the American Revolution by Andrew M. Schocket
Andrew M. Schocket, Fighting over the Founders: How we remember the American Revolution New York: New York University Press, 2015. Most readers of this book, scholarly or otherwise, will come to it with prejudices about the Revolution and its meanings. They are likely to find them subjected to healthy and timely challenge, given the recent resurgence of political uses of aspects of the era. Schocket pursues his exploration of “the contemporary memory of the American Revolution” (4) through its manifestations in political discourse, historical biography, museums and historic sites, films and tv series and, in a slightly grab-bag final chapter, court-rooms, contemporary political movements (including the Tea Party) and reenactors. Schocket defines his periods as follows: the historical Revolution covers the 1765 Stamp Act to the 1788 ratification of the Constitution, and contemporary memory encompasses 2000-2012 (with occasional forays outside). Schocket’s central argument is that all these interpreters of the Revolution […]
Book Review: Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1945 by Dana Cooper
The wave of American heiresses marrying British aristocrats in the late nineteenth century has often added colour to studies of Anglo-American relations and been subject to specialist scholarly enquiry (notably Montgomery’s ‘Gilded Prostitution’ (1989)). Where Montgomery was more concerned with the social and cultural impact of these marriages and their relationship to a changing British aristocracy, Cooper focuses on five of the most prominent of these women as non-traditional diplomatic agents operating at a key period in the development of the Anglo-American special relationship.