Finding Reviews of Works about History on the Internet

On-Line Publications Devoted Exclusively to Providing Reviews of History Books

• History Reviews On-Line. This is an electronic journal devoted to reviewing books in all fields of history. It is supported by the DePauw University and is issued three times a year–Fall, Winter, and Spring/Summer. Editorial board and reviewers represent colleges and universities, etc., throughout the United States and well beyond.
• The H-Net Review Project. Part of a project. Humanities OnLine, produced by Michigan State University. Qualified historians write the reviews. You can browse through the reviews (arranged by author) for the past several years, beginning in 1993-94, or you can do a search by selecting the link,”Search the H-Net Reviews..” for specific titles by keywords, titles, or authors (last name first). For an example of the last, a search for “Faust, Drew Gilpin,” will produce a review of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War(1997). One should also be able to do a subject search if one knows the exact Library of Congress subject classification by filling in the last field in the section titled, “B. Search the H -Net Reviews by category.” I have found, however, that this does not work very well.
• Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1990- . Published by a professor of Greek at Bryn Mawr College and a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Although books reviewed are in the classics field, many should be useful to those who study or teach classics, Western civilization or world history.
• The Medieval Review, 1994- . Published by the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University. Reviews books in all areas of medieval studies, a field it interprets very broadly.
• Reviews in American History. Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Persons accessing this site at subscribing institutions can read the reviews on-line beginning with Vol. 23 (1995). Others can find the titles of the reviewed books on-line and then read the reviews in the journal’s hardcopy version. (Austin Community College subscribes to the on-line service. Students and faculty may access the reviews from any ACC computer that is connected to ACCNet.)

On-line History Journals that Include Reviews

• Renaissance Forum, March 1996- . Interdisciplinary refereed journal. Specializes in early-modern English literary and historical scholarship. Published by the Departments of English and History, Hull University, UK.
• Comitatus:A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Has reviews appearing in the current issue. (To access these reviews, click on the picture of the man.) Comitatus is a publication of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

The American Library Association’s Booklist
Booklist Home Page.. Has on-line reviews (written by librarians) of new books in all fields. Follow links to history reviews in various volumes. This site also provides cumulative indexes of reviews that have appeared in previous volumes of the hard-copy version of Booklist. The reviews in this publication are brief, mainly descriptive, and seemingly all positive.

Journals that Provide Tables of Contents Listing Reviews in their Hard-copy Issues

• The American Historical Review, William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of American History, and Western Historical Quarterly can all be found at The History Cooperative.
• Journal of Canadian History: A Canadian Journal of Non-Canadian History: A Canadian Journal of Non-Canadian History. Has cumulative indexes to reviews appearing in the journal between 1981-1995 and tables of contents to individual journals from December 1994 to the present. The journal reviews books about historical subjects world-wide, with an apparent concentration on Europe and the United States.
• Journal of Southern History. Begins with February 1995 issue.

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