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History & Society

The Remains of the Day

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The novel follows Stevens, the longtime butler of Darlington Hall, during a motoring trip through the English countryside in 1956. Although the journey ostensibly allows him to visit Miss Kenton, the hall’s former housekeeper, it becomes an extended reconsideration of his professional ideals, his loyalty to Lord Darlington and the personal choices he has made. Stevens narrates through recollection rather than straightforward confession. His measured explanations gradually reveal discrepancies between how he wishes to understand his life and what readers can infer from the events he describes. The result is simultaneously a character study, a restrained love story and an examination of moral responsibility. Public history and private regret remain intertwined: Stevens’s emotional evasions resemble his reluctance to judge the political activities conducted at Darlington Hall before the Second World War.

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History & Society

The Island of Missing Trees

A Novel

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The novel links a divided family to the divided island of Cyprus. Its principal human story follows Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, whose youthful relationship develops amid communal hostility and the violence surrounding Cyprus in 1974. A second timeline centers on their London-born daughter, Ada, who inherits the emotional consequences of a past her parents have largely concealed from her. Between these narratives stands a fig tree descended from one that grew through a Nicosia tavern where Kostas and Defne once met. Shafak uses the fig tree not simply as a symbol but as a speaking character and witness. Human history, family memory, migration, plant life and ecological damage are therefore narrated as interconnected rather than separate subjects. The chronology moves between Cyprus and London and between the 1970s and a later family present, gradually disclosing how political violence enters intimate relationships and persists through silence. The novel’s six…

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History & Society

The Rediscovery of America

Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

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The Rediscovery of America is a large-scale reinterpretation of United States history that places Native nations within—not beside—the histories of colonization, revolution, constitutional government, territorial expansion, the Civil War, federal administration, and twentieth-century reform. Spanning roughly five centuries, the book draws together scholarship on numerous regions and communities to show that Native peoples remained political actors whose diplomacy, resistance, adaptation, labor, territorial power, and legal claims influenced the developing United States. Blackhawk’s method is synthetic rather than encyclopedic: he does not attempt to provide a complete chronological history of every Indigenous nation. Instead, he revisits major turning points commonly found in national histories and asks how they look when Native-newcomer relations become part of the central explanation. European colonization emerges as uncertain and contested rather than inevitable. Britain’s imperial…

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