If you flick through to the back pages of an academic journal or comb the Sunday newspaper supplements, you will likely find a host of book reviews to consider. The book review is an important part of the discipline of history. It is a place in which historians can engage with and respond to the work of their colleagues and assess their contributions to the field. As a student of history, you may be asked to write a book review yourself: this is a very useful exercise in order to teach you to read actively and form opinions on the arguments of other historians. This article will give you some tips on how to approach this exercise.
The first questions you should ask when reviewing a historical monograph are the same as for any source: who wrote it, when, and for what readership? These questions help you to gather important contextual information about the book:
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
