Caroline Elkins

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Elkins's later book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022), received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, which also interviewed Elkins, who stated that, "I don’t believe that taking down statues erases or distorts history. Burning or hiding documents—that certainly erases and distorts history. I was an expert witness in a lawsuit against the British government by Kenyan survivors of detention camps, which led to the 'discovery' of several hundred boxes of unreleased government files on the camps. My book [Legacy of Violence] is, in part, about how we write history when much of the evidence has been destroyed or concealed. This is an important moment, in which statues and documents are coming together to help us reassess how the world became what it is." [25]

Reviewers call Legacy of Violence "Top-shelf history offering tremendous acknowledgement of past systemic abuses," and "a feat of scholarship that elucidates the bureaucratic and legal machinery of oppression, dissects the intellectual justifications for it, and explores in gripping, sometimes grisly detail the suffering that resulted. The result is a forceful challenge to recent historiographical and political defenses of British exceptionalism that punctures myths of paternalism and progress." [26] [27]

Positive reviewers include historians Rana Mitter, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Maya Jasanoff, Richard Drayton, Alex von Tunzelmann, John Darwin, Robert Gildea, Priya Satia, Erik Linstrum, Wm. Roger Louis, and Jill Lepore. Other scholars and journalists delivering positive reviews include Homi Bhabha, Howard W. French, Tim Adams, Amitav Ghosh, Robbie Millen, and Priyamvada Gopal.[ citation needed ]

Historian Robert Lyman (former British army major) gave it a negative review calling it "a piece of ideology masquerading as history". [28] University of Maryland historian Richard N. Price remarked that "if the book tends to overstuff its argument, it is also a book that is curiously thin in its conceptualization. Nuance and subtlety are strikingly absent throughout all the key arguments of the book." [29]

Selected works

See also

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References

  1. ↑ "History Department Faculty: Caroline Elkins". Harvard.edu. Archived from the original on November 7, 2012. Retrieved November 11, 2012.
  2. ↑ "Caroline M. Elkins". Faculty & Research. Harvard Business School. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  3. ↑ Parry, Marc (August 18, 2016). "Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire | Marc Parry". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved July 6, 2019.
  4. ↑ "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire". www.kirkusreviews.com. Kirkus. February 1, 2022. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  5. ↑ Keymer, David (February 4, 2022). "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire". Library Journal. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  6. ↑ "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire". www.publishersweekly.com. Publishers Weekly. October 19, 2021. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  7. ↑ Shaffi, Sarah (October 10, 2022). "Female history and biography writing dominates Baillie Gifford shortlist". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  8. ↑ Staff, The New York Times Books (November 22, 2022). "100 Notable Books of 2022". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  9. ↑ Statesman, New (December 3, 2022). "Books of the year 2022". New Statesman. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  10. ↑ "21 best books for history lovers: BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year 2022". HistoryExtra. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  11. ↑ "Books of the Year 2022 | History Today". www.historytoday.com. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  12. ↑ Mark Skinner (September 14, 2022). "The Best Books of 2022: History" . Retrieved March 2, 2023.
  13. ↑ Larsen, Erik. "Search for truth yields Pulitzer; Book documents atrocities in Kenya", Asbury Park Press , April 30, 2006. Accessed March 7, 2022, via Newspapers.com. "When Caroline Fox graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1987, her teachers had no doubt she was going to go places. She didn't disappoint Princeton was next, then Harvard and after that, halfway around the world to Kenya Today a Harvard University professor and married with two young sons, Caroline Elkins is one of the nation's foremost scholars on African history and a renowned expert on a little-known brutal chapter in the post-World War II history of British colonialism in Africa."
  14. ↑ "Press Award in Monte Carlo". The Magazine of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Archived from the original on June 5, 2015. Retrieved October 10, 2013.
  15. ↑ "Kenya: White Terror". YouTube. Retrieved October 10, 2013.
  16. ↑ "Faculty Home Page". Harvard University Department of History. Archived from the original on August 14, 2013. Retrieved October 10, 2013.
  17. ↑ "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya". Pulitzer Prize Committee. Retrieved October 10, 2013.
  18. ↑ Elkins, Caroline (June 1, 2015). "Looking beyond Mau Mau: Archiving Violence in the Era of Decolonization". The American Historical Review. 120 (3): 852–868. doi:10.1093/ahr/120.3.852. ISSN   1937-5239.
  19. ↑ "Elkins receives named appointment at Center for African Studies". News.harvard.edu. July 6, 2015. Retrieved October 25, 2018.
  20. ↑ "Caroline Elkins named professor of history". Harvard Gazette. October 2009. Retrieved October 10, 2013.
  21. ↑ Cobain, Ian; Norton-Taylor, Richard (April 18, 2012). "Sins of colonialists lay concealed for decades in secret archive". The Guardian . Retrieved October 25, 2018.
  22. ↑ "Mau Mau abuse victims to get payouts". BBC.com. June 6, 2013. Retrieved October 25, 2018.
  23. ↑ "Kenya Unveils Memorial to Those Tortured During British Rule". VOA. September 12, 2015.
  24. ↑ "From thesis to record of unspeakable torture evidence that UK wanted buried". www.standardmedia.co.ke. Standard Media. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  25. ↑ "Bloody Britain: 'PW' Talks with Caroline Elkins". www.publishersweekly.com. Publishers Weekly. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  26. ↑ "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire". www.kirkusreviews.com. Kirkus. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  27. ↑ "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire". www.publishersweekly.com. Publishers Weekly. Retrieved February 28, 2022.
  28. ↑ "Violence against history". The Critic . October 2, 2022.
  29. ↑ "Price on Elkins, 'Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire'." H-Empire. December 2022.

Further reading

Caroline Elkins
Born
Caroline Fox

1969 (age 54–55)
NationalityAmerican
Occupation(s)Professor and non-fiction writer
Awards Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright, Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Academic background
Alma mater Harvard University
Princeton University
1962–1975
Pulitzer Medal - obverse.png

Pulitzer Medal - reverse.png
1976–2000
2001–2025
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