Mit seinem vierten Roman And the Land Lay Still hat James Robertson, einer der interessantesten Gegenwartsautoren Schottlands, ein politisches und gesellschaftliches Panorama des Landes seit dem 2. Weltkrieg entworfen, das dem Leser und der Leserin einen intimen und vielschichtigen Einblick in die Komplexität dieser Nation und ihrer neueren Entwicklung erlaubt. In seinem Beitrag bespricht Dietmar Böhnke (Leipzig) das Buch und ordnet es in Robertsons Werk und die schottische Gegenwartsliteratur ein.

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Review of: Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia. By Brian D. McKnight. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Pp. [xvi], 252. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-3769-7.) Excerpt: Civil War scholars have produced a number of noteworthy studies of guerrilla warfare in recent years. These historians have reassessed the origins of guerrilla violence, its impact on local communities, its role in the overall war effort, and some of its notorious figures. In Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia, Brian D. McKnight addresses not only the infamous guerrilla Champ Ferguson but also the larger context of the war in southern Appalachia. The author argues that fluid loyalties, extreme paranoia, and opportunism defined Ferguson's war in the Upper Cumberland region [...]

Review of: Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South. By Susanna Michele Lee. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 270. Cloth, $95.00.). Excerpt: Susanna Michele Lee’s Claiming the Union sheds new light on something we thought we already knew. Lee examines the records of the Southern Claims Commission (SCC), the post–Civil War congressional commission tasked with assessing southerners’ claims for lost and damaged property, and interprets them differently from many scholars before her. The SCC records are a staple of Civil War loyalty scholarship, casting significant light on southerners marginalized or silenced by the Lost Cause’s facade of white unity. Claiming the Union is not another attempt to glean every last hint of wartime loyalty out of postwar records. Lee successfully places the wartime struggles over loyalty and citizenship in the SCC’s proper Reconstruction context. This placement of the SCC squarely within the Reconstruction era is insightful in and of itself. But Lee offers much more than that; she argues that the process embedded in the SCC’s direct engagement with southern civilians informed a “vernacular citizenship” that shaped postemancipation American citizenship (7). The overall result is a thoughtful and effective book that enriches our understanding of the complex nature of postemancipation American citizenship [...]

Review of: Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. By R. Scott Huffard Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 324.) Excerpt: Generations of scholars have debated the degree of continuity or discontinuity in the South’s transition from “Old” to “New.” Railroads are a critical part of this story of industrial transformation, and they are the focus of [End Page 56] R. Scott Huffard Jr.’s Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South. Building on a current historiographical reassessment of the capitalistic nature of the pre–Civil War South, Huffard sees the railroad boom of the 1880s and 1890s as an expansion of earlier practices. In the post-Reconstruction South, railroads served as tangible capitalist development that Huffard analyzes in some unique ways. Moving beyond track mileage and corporate ledger books, Huffard blends top down sources like political correspondence, company records, and newspapers with “mentalities, mores, and stories” to show how the South embraced the capitalist ethos of the railroad while utilizing the region’s deep-rooted racial hierarchies to paper over capitalism’s more destructive elements [...]

Review of: Inventing Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History and Memory. Wallace Hettle. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8071-3781-9, 224 pp., cloth, $34.95. Excerpt: With memory studies of the Civil War and related topics increasing steadily, few luminaries have been as noticeably absent in such work as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. In Inventing Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History and Memory, Wallace Hettle presents Jackson as understood by the people who knew him—and few truly did—and those who admired him. In his introduction, Hettle pronounces his intention to explore what Jackson meant to people and to analyze what those meanings tell us about the South as a whole. For the most part, this short and lively book accomplishes those goals, and Hettle offers an important new perspective on one of the Confederacy’s most mythologized figures [...]

Book review of the biography "Mfinyanzi Aingia Kasri – Siti Binti Saad, Malkia wa Taarab", written by Nasra Mohammed Hilal (2007)

Book Review: Mirza, Sarah & Margaret Strobel (ed.) 1989. Three Swahili Women. Life Histories from Mombasa. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. and Mirza, Sarah & Margaret Strobel (ed.) 1989. Wanawake watatu wa Kiswahili hadithi za maisha kutoka Mombasa, Kenya. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Book Review of: Johannes Fabian (ed.), History from below. The vocabulary of Elisabethville. By Andre Yav. Text, Translations and interpretive essay (Creole Language Library, Vol.7). Edited, translated and commented by Johannes Fabian with assistance from Kalundi Mango. With linguistic notes by W. Schicho. Amsterdam- Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990. 236 pp. Review of Noel-Jacques Gueunier (ed.), La chroniques Swahilie du Cad/Umari de Mayotte. Edition critique. (Recherches et Documents, 2).(Madagascar\''): Etablissement d\''Enseignement Superieur des Lettres (CEDRATOM),1989.

book review of Xavier Garnier''s "The Swahili novel. The notion of \''minor literature'' put to the test" (2006)