My constant companions during the isolation necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 were a group of long-dead popes. Gregory III, Zacharias, Stephen II and his brother Paul I, their luckless successor Pope Constantine II,[1] Constantine’s ruthless deposer Stephen III, and the ostensibly more urbane Hadrian I[2] ruled the see of Rome in the second … Continue reading
The Middle Dutch Brut, by Sjoerd Levelt
Published in the Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies series of Liverpool University Press is my edition and English translation of the chronicle which I have called the Middle Dutch Brut. The Prose Brut was the principal historiographical tradition of late medieval England, and exists in various versions in Anglo-Norman French, Middle English and Latin. The … Continue reading
Sailor Talk: Labor, Utterance, and Meaning in the Works of Melville, Conrad, and London
I was raised in a world rich with sailor talk. My father, Captain James (‘Jay’) S. Bercaw, was a masterful storyteller. My sister Katrina, brother Seán, and I cherished sitting at his feet as he told brilliant and evocative sea stories. He had sailed twice around the world as First Mate on a square-rigged vessel, … Continue reading
Slavery and arms: Britain and America’s Civil War – In Conversation with Jim Powell & Meredith Wheeler
Before its civil war, America supplied 80 per cent of the raw material for Britain’s largest industry, the cotton trade. During the war, this fell to almost zero. Jim Powell’s new book Losing the Thread: Cotton, Liverpool and the American Civil War examines what happened to this trade and to the Liverpool cotton market, its beneficiaries and … Continue reading
How British cotton affected America’s Civil War – In Conversation with Jim Powell & Meredith Wheeler
Before its civil war, America supplied 80 per cent of the raw material for Britain’s largest industry, the cotton trade. During the war, this fell to almost zero. Jim Powell’s new book Losing the Thread: Cotton, Liverpool and the American Civil War examines what happened to this trade and to the Liverpool cotton market, its beneficiaries and … Continue reading
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