Open AccessDead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920
Author(s) -
Katie Wood
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of new zealand studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.102
0eISSN - 2324-3740
pISSN - 1176-306X
DOI - 10.26686/jnzs.v0ins29.6272
Subject(s) - subversion , censorship , archivist , politics , bureaucracy , state (computer science) , resistance (ecology) , project commissioning , law , sociology , media studies , publishing , political science , history , archaeology , computer science , ecology , algorithm , biology
“Archivist by day and labour historian by night” Jared Davidson combines his complementary occupations to bring us Dead Letters: Censorship and Surveillance in New Zealand 1914–1920, an engaging book that uses the intimacy of surveillance records to explore broader historical themes of wartime state control and resistance. Davidson places his work in the tradition of “history from below,” and this book achieves some of the best qualities of that tradition; the detailed personal histories bring to life characters that may otherwise have been forgotten, but who are in fact connected to transnational webs of communication and migration of people, political ideas, organisations, and bureaucracies of surveillance and control.