Enfilade

As someone long unsettled by the ambiguity around the word ‘American’ (I recall being confused by it as a kid), I found Greg Grandin’s July 4 opinion piece for The New York Times immensely satisfying. His latest book appeared in April from Penguin. –CH

Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Press, 2025), 768 pages, ISBN: 978-0593831250, $35.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.

The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.

America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest—the greatest mortality event in human history—through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism.

Grandin’s book sheds new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain; the Colombian Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of Cold War political terror, death squads, and disappearances; and the radical journalist Ernest Gruening, who, in championing non-interventionism in Latin America, helped broker the most spectacularly successful policy reversal in United States history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. In so doing, Grandin argues that Latin America’s deeply held culture of social democracy can be an effective counterweight to today’s spreading rightwing authoritarianism.

A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.

Greg Grandin is the author of The End of the Myth, which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Empire of Necessity, which won both the Bancroft and Beveridge prizes in American history; Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and a number of other widely acclaimed books. He is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.

From Yale UP:

Travis Glasson, Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0300258899, $38.

The story of colonists who were neither loyalists nor patriots during the American Revolution, told through the experiences of one transatlantic family

At least one‑third of the colonial population were neutrals during the American Revolution, yet they have rarely featured in narratives that shape our ideas about the conflict. By following a single transatlantic family, the Crugers, historian Travis Glasson puts neutrals—the ‘nobody men’—at the center of this tumultuous period’s history.

Like most neutrals, the Crugers prioritized peace above any specific constitutional arrangement and sought ways out of the military struggle. The Crugers were prominent among prewar defenders of colonial rights, and their experiences once the shooting started, in places including New York, the island of St. Croix, and London, reveal the complex dilemmas that confronted those in the middle during the violent upheaval. The Crugers’ dealings with each other—and with a cast of boldfaced names including Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, Lord North, and George Washington—illuminate how some people looked to chart alternate courses through perilous waters. Based on extensive research in the United States and Britain, Nobody Men humanizes what it meant to live through revolutionary civil war and recovers little‑known but essential histories of how new nations formed as an older empire broke apart.

Travis Glasson is associate professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction

Part One | ‘Cruger and Liberty!: 1760–1775
1  The Crugers’ World
2  Stamps and People
3  Transatlantic Patriots
4  The Center Fails

Part Two | ‘Some Middle Way Should be Found Out’, 1775–1783
5  Whigs Killing for the King
6  The Price of Neutrality
7  The Search for Peace
8  Friend of Washington?

Part Three | ‘My Heart Still Cleaves to New York’, 1783–1800
9  Subjects and Citizens
10  Oblivion and Conciliation

Conclusion

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

From Reaktion Books, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Larry Silver, Old Age in Art (London: Reaktion, 2025), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1836390527, £20 / $30.

Old Age in Art shows how elders have been depicted from ancient Greece and Rome to the present century. The book explores portraits, including self-portraits, and stories of older figures in religion, myth, and history, focusing on the theme of wisdom versus folly. Larry Silver also discusses the concept of old age within the Middle Ages and early modern periods. The final chapter examines how renowned artists like Michelangelo, Titian, and Monet turned to experimental forms and new subjects in their later years. This book provides a comprehensive overview of old age in European art history.

Larry Silver is the Farquhar Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania and a specialist in Dutch and Flemish paintings. He has published numerous monographs and exhibition catalogues, including Rembrandt’s Holland (Reaktion, 2018).

c o n t e n t s

Preface: Ars longa, vita brevis
1  Old Age Is Relative: Age and Stage as Concepts from Antiquity to the Renaissance
2  Wisdom and Folly
3  Old Age Stories
4  Portraits – Self and Others
5  Old-Age Style

References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

From Hirmer, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Elizabeth Angelicoussis and Leo Schmidt, eds., with photographs by Pete Huggins, Holkham: An English Treasure House and Its Landscape (Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2025), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-3777444444, $65. With contributions by Peter Burman, Polly Feversham, Anne Glenconner, Katherine Hardwick-Kulpa, John Hardy, Uta Hassler, Christine Hiskey, Markus Joachim, Christian Keller, Axel Klausmeier, Werner Koch, Silke Langenberg, Tom Leicester, Laura Nuvoloni, Bernhard Ritter, Christoph Martin Vogtherr, and Tom Williamson.

Created over four decades, from the 1720s to the 1760s, by the highly erudite, visionary, and ambitious Earl of Leicester, Holkham Hall is a masterpiece of Palladian architecture. Richly illustrated and with far-reaching essays, this volume invites us to a splendid tour through an incredibly well-preserved house, with all its splendidly furnished interiors and amazing collection of artworks still in place. Lord Leicester designed Holkham as the ideal home and setting for the ancient sculptures, distinguished paintings, and other treasures he had acquired on his Grand Tour. The unique Marble Hall and the Gallery revive and celebrate the virtues of ancient Rome, while the saloons and staterooms vibrate with a baroque sense of grandeur and splendor. With the original family still in custodianship, Holkham is a unique survivor of the golden age of English country house culture.

Elizabeth Angelicoussis is a classical archaeologist and expert on eighteenth-century sculpture collections.
Leo Schmidt is an architectural historian and emeritus professor of heritage conservation at Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus.

c o n t e n t s

Foreword
Introduction
1  Thomas Coke, Earl of Leiceser — The Builder of Holkham
2  The Holkham Landscape
3  The Architecture
4  The Rooms and the Collections
5  Living at Holkham
6  Holkham — Past, Present, and Future

Picture Credits
Acknowledgments
Authors and Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index

From De Luca Editori d’Arte:

Clare Hornsby and Caroline Barron, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Etchings from the Research Collections of the British School at Rome (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-8865576403, €60.

This book presents some of the most significant objects in the Research Collections of the British School at Rome (BSR), gathered by the School’s first student and third Director, the archaeologist Thomas Ashby (1874–1931). Ashby bought a large number of early books and prints that now make up the basis of the Special Collections, including a substantial number—around 150—loose etched prints and several complete printed books made by the multi-talented artist, architect, and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Venice 1720–Rome 1778).

The etchings come from all stages of Piranesi’s career and reflect many aspects of his vast output. They have been the subject of exhibitions organised by the British School, in Rome and elsewhere, and they feature in online catalogues, but this book is the first produced by BSR to offer an analysis of a selection of the loose prints, 104 in total. The focus of the catalogue is the archaeological and topographical subject matter of the prints, as well as an examination of the text that accompanies them in the form of detailed labels and captions. Piranesi’s print output has become widely known in the last century or so and his name has come to be associated with drama, exaggeration, fantasy and even mystery. This book takes a close look at the prints and reveals a partial corrective to that view: Piranesi the antiquarian and archaeologist emerges as protagonist here, highlighting just one of the rich variety of responses to the ancient past that formed the cultural environment of Grand Tour Rome.

Clare Hornsby is an art and architectural historian and a Research Fellow at BSR. She has published on the Grand Tour, the antiquities market between Rome and London, and on eighteenth-century architecture. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a member of the Centro di Studi sulla Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma, and of the Scientific Committee of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Caroline Barron is an ancient historian who works on the cultural and historical significance of Latin epigraphy, from antiquity to the present day. A monograph on the collecting of Latin inscriptions in the eighteenth-century is forthcoming, and her current research project is on the history of epigraphic forgery. She is Assistant Professor in Classics (Roman History) in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a Research Fellow at BSR.

This brief publication (in Italian) is available as a free PDF from De Luca Editori d’Arte; the English abstract is included below:

Sabina d’Inzillo Carranza de Cavi, Glama Ströberle tra Roma e Lisbona: Vieira, Benefial, Masucci e la pietra rossa (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2025), 31 pages, ISBN: 978-8865576502 (PDF file), free.

This essay, which thoroughly analyzes three notebooks now in the special collections of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, focuses on the graphic style of João Glama Ströberle, a Portuguese painter of German descent, a pupil of Vieira Lusitano, and a master of Vieira Portuense. His training in Rome from 1734 to 1741 with talented artists such as the non-conformist Marco Benefial and the Marattesque Agostino Masucci made him an important trait d’union between Italy and Portugal, where he contributed to the transfer of the principles of life drawing and academic draughtsmanship. The essay discusses the graphic techniques learned in Rome, paying particular attention to the use of red chalk in the 18th century, between Rome and Lisbon.