Books by Neil Smith

Matched to the latest Cambridge assessment criteria, this in-depth Exam Success Guide brings clarity and focus to exam preparation with detailed and practical guidance on raising attainment in IGCSE & O level History.

He robbed from the rich to give to the poor, or so the legend goes. But who was the outlaw known as Robin Hood? How did his legend develop and how has it changed over the passing centuries? This book explores how the legend grew, and how famous names such as Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, and Alan-a-Dale became associated with Robin Hood.

Accepting the quest in order to regain his kingdom, Jason assembled a crew of legendary heroes, including Hercules, Orpheus, Atalanta, and the twins Castor and Polydeuces. With this band of warriors and demi-gods, Jason set sail in the Argo on a journey across the known world. This title examines its historical context, and, its classical sources.

With lesson plans, advice on planning educational trips, homework suggestions and tips for assessment and marking; this guide provides teachers with practical advice on various aspects of teaching history in secondary schools. It is split into separate sections for teaching ages 11-14 and pupils aged 14-16.

This book challenges conventional wisdom - which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of the new middle class tastes and a demand for urban living - to reveal gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late-20th century.

The Endgame of Globalization argues that US actions since 9/11 represent the final stage in the US's century-long effort to complete the project of making US-led globalization a concrete reality across the world.

An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us "e;beyond geography."e; Neil Smith debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States was itself a political symptom of the emerging empire. This book provides a vital geographical-historical context for understanding the power and limits of contemporary globalization, which can now be seen as representing the third of three distinct historical moments of U.S. global ambition.The story unfolds through a decisive account of the career of Isaiah Bowman (1878-1950), the most famous American geographer of the twentieth century. For nearly four decades Bowman operated around the vortex of state power, working to bring an American order to the global landscape. An explorer on the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 who came to be known first as "e;Woodrow Wilson's geographer,"e; and later as Frankin D. Roosevelt's, Bowman was present at the creation of U.S. liberal foreign policy. A quarter-century later, Bowman was at the center of Roosevelt's State Department, concerned with the disposition of Germany and heightened U.S. access to European colonies; he was described by Dean Acheson as a key "e;architect of the United Nations."e; In that period he was a leader in American science, served as president of Johns Hopkins University, and became an early and vociferous cold warrior. A complicated, contradictory, and at times controversial figure who was very much in the public eye, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Bowman's career as a geographer in an era when the value of geography was deeply questioned provides a unique window into the contradictory uses of geographical knowledge in the construction of the American Empire. Smith's historical excavation reveals, in broad strokes yet with lively detail, that today's American-inspired globalization springs not from the 1980s but from two earlier moments in 1919 and 1945, both of which ended in failure. By recharting the geography of this history, Smith brings the politics-and the limits-of contemporary globalization sharply into focus.