Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920

Abstract

“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.