DiotimosReading Desk
Category

History

Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.

2 itemsCategory: History · newest first
  1. PDF

    Missing Persons

    Greg Woolf reviews Stephen L. Tuck’s Escape from Pompeii and Jess Venner’s The Lost Voices of Pompeii, arguing that both replace the romanticized image of Pompeii as a city frozen in time with a messier account of evacuation, survival, and loss. Tuck uses material evidence and names found in neighboring communities to build a cautious case that many inhabitants escaped and blended into nearby towns, although such names cannot conclusively identify refugees. Venner reconstructs seven Pompeians from inscriptions, graffiti, financial records, objects, and urban remains through “critical fabulation,” producing vivid but necessarily less secure biographies, especially of enslaved people. Together, the books suggest that leaving the city did not ensure safety: some survivors returned or resettled, while others died beyond the walls awaiting rescue.

    History#Prediction#Fire
  2. PDF

    The Depths of the Wild

    Sophie Yeo praises Eloise Kane’s Wilderlands as a clear-eyed history of Britain’s long “dewilding” and a corrective to nostalgic ideas of an untouched natural past. Drawing on palaeoecology, recent scientific debates, and Kane’s fieldwork, the book traces how hunting, settlement, agriculture, and later development transformed the landscape from the post-Ice Age wildwood onward. Yeo especially values Kane’s caution in interpreting fragmentary evidence—from buried eagles to Seahenge—because modern ideas of wildness can distort what prehistoric people and places meant. That restraint gives the book contemporary force: archaeology, Yeo argues, must inform rewilding so future landscapes are not designed around nostalgia, guilt, marketable romance, or aesthetic preference alone.

    History#AncientHistory#Trees#Birds