This Month's Featured Books
Last Month's Featured Books
Black Tudors The Untold Story
Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 Combining exemplary investigative research with enthralling readability and a radiant human touch, this book will surely transform commonly-held perceptions of sixteenth century England, and the role of minorities in British history. Through detailed portraits of ten fascinating individuals whose stories have gone untold, this book lays bare the varied and often vital roles played by Africans who lived free and varied lives in Tudor times. As the author points out in her introduction, the popular view is that “people of African origin first arrived in England when the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in 1948.” Not so, and the author also rebuffs the assumption that African presence in Tudor England was always an experience of “enslavement and discrimination”. Among these absorbing pages we discover John Blanke, a King’s trumpeter, most likely to have been born in North or West Africa, and Jacques Francis, a salvage diver who was the first known African to testify before an English court. Then there’s Moroccan Mary Fillis who came to England as a child and was baptised. This riveting reassessment of an oft-explored era deserves to be widely read. ~ Joanne Owen
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Travellers in the Third Reich
The acclaimed history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts. One of the Daily Telegraph's Best Books of 2017; A Guardian `Readers' Choice' Best Book of 2017; Without the benefit of hindsight, how do you interpret what's right in front of your eyes?; Based on fascinating firsthand accounts, this illuminating book asks what it was like to travel in the Third Reich during the interwar era. Was it possible to know what was really going on? Was it possible for a visiting outsider “to grasp the essence of National Socialism”? The accounts of a multitude of travellers are surveyed - ordinary tourists, academics and athletes, alongside royalty, celebrities and creative types like Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Their experiences and responses are recounted in all their intriguing variation - bewilderment, obliviousness, internal outrage, scholarly outrage. I found the chapter on African American academic and Germanophile Professor William Edward Burghardt Du Bois particularly engrossing. Du Bois visited Germany in 1936 seeking to study race prejudice, but the organisation that commissioned his trip instead permitted him to investigate education and industry. He returned to report the “vindictive cruelty” of the “campaign against the Jews” and, while he experienced no “personal insult or discrimination” himself, he posited the view that matters might be different “if there were any number of Negroes in Germany”. Spritely in tone, and finely researched, this is an engaging must-read for those with an interest in German history, and in social history per se. It might also serve as a cautionary tale to pay closer attention to the world around us.
Fashion on the Ration Style in the Second World War
After so many books devoted to how the nation’s Home Front cooked and gardened during WWI it’s refreshing to see Julie Summers tackling the question of how peoples dealt with clothing themselves. Making do, mending, using unorthodox fabrics and ingenuity kept the country clothed and even fashionable in an age of hardship. Like for Like Reading Millions Like Us:Women's Lives during the Second World War, Virginia Nicholson Jambusters: The Story of the Women's Institute in the Second World War, Julie Summers
The Month Before's Featured Books
The Curious Habits of Dr Adams: A 1950s Murder Mystery
Perfect for fans of Kate Summerscale, this is the chilling true tale of Dr John Bodkin Adams, the family doctor suspected of murdering 160 of his patients in 1950s Eastbourne.
The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath
As a gripping piece of true historical crime, this will appeal to the many fans of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Heligoland Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea
Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 An absolutely engrossing work of micro-history exploring how one tiny North Sea archipelago played an improbably large role in defining modern Europe. Located 300 miles off the east coast of England, and 29 miles off the German coastline, Heligoland has been inhabited since prehistoric times. Following a period under Danish sovereignty, the land became Britain’s smallest colony for most of the nineteenth century. After a spell as a seaside spa for European liberals, Britain ceded the land to Germany in 1890, whereupon it was transformed into a naval base by the Kaiser and later Hitler, thereby consolidating its pivotal role in Anglo-German relations. The land was fiercely fought over in both world wars - in fact, Britain directed the largest non-nuclear explosion in history at the island in 1947. But, as the author shows through his crisply engaging style, drawing upon endlessly varied sources of archival information – literature, art, film – the island’s symbolic importance continued deep into the twentieth century. I came away with untold new insights, and the utmost admiration for the author’s nimble melding of scholarly excellence with readability. ~ Joanne Owen
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