Early Modern Queens

Early Modern Queens

by | Dec 1, 2024

Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power By Leah Redmond Chang.  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023. Hardcover, 512 pages, $35.00.  Reviewed by Jesse Russell. In the Anglophone world, there is one (and only one) Renaissance queen: Elizabeth Tudor....
Sailing East

Sailing East

by | Aug 18, 2024

Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company, 1550-1650 By David Howarth.  Yale University Press, 2023.  Hardcover, 480 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. One of the most popular phrases among Marxists during the long reign of Barack H. Obama was...
Virtue in the Age of Neo-Machiavellianism

Virtue in the Age of Neo-Machiavellianism

by | Mar 10, 2024

Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena By James Hankins.  Harvard University Press, 2023.  Hardcover, 448 pages, $55. Reviewed by Jesse Russell.  We live in a Neo-Machiavellian age. Gone are the “End of History”...
Germans at War

Germans at War

by | Dec 3, 2023

Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500  By Peter H. Wilson.  Belknap Press, 2023. Hardcover, 976 pages, $39.95.  Reviewed by Jesse Russell.  “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be...
Friends, Countrymen, Romans

Friends, Countrymen, Romans

by | Oct 1, 2023

Rome and America: Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging By Dean Hammer. Cambridge University Press, 2023.  Hardcover, 262 pages, $110.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. Since its inception, America has been many things, but, in a certain sense, it has always...