Modern History Notes

Eric Foner, "Inhuman Bondage: On Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights," Nation, 10 August, reviews Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights.

Adam Winkler, "The Secret History of Guns," Atlantic, September, recalls a time when supporters of African American civil rights saw the right to bear arms as essential and the National Rifle Association supported modest gun regulation.

Sholto Byrnes for the Independent, 14 August, and Tristram Hunt for the Guardian, 14 August, review Kwasi Kwarteng's Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World. The historian and Conservative MP for Spelthorne challenges Niall Ferguson's and Michael Gove's neo-conservative view of empire.

Paul Mitchinson reviews Raymond Holden's Richard Strauss: A Musical Life for the Washington Post, 11 August.

Julie Salverson, "They Never Told Us These Things," Maisonneuve, 12 August, interviews indigenous people of northwest Canada who worked the mine that supplied much of the uranium for the Manhattan Project. They had no idea how it would be used or how their own health would be affected.

Biographers of Albert Camus, Olivier Todd and Robert Zaretsky, are skeptical of claims in the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, that he was murdered by the KGB.

Robert Dallek, "Untold Story of the Bay of Pigs," Newsweek, 14 August, uses newly declassified documents to offer a revised version of the blundered attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro.