This article presents a review of "Making socialists: Mary Bridges Adams and the fight for knowledge and power, 1855-1939," by Jane Martin. Jane Martin has explored the history of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century-British women educational activists in numerous publications over the past two decades. Her first book, "Women and the Politics of Schooling in Victorian and Edwardian England" (Martin 1999b), set out the themes she would continue to explore in her subsequent work. Martin is drawn to biography or the telling of individual lives as a way to illuminate broader social movements and political forces and to show how individuals have exercised their own agency to shape history. At its best, this careful excavation of the details of individual lives can produce the historical equivalent of Clifford Geertz's "thick description," an amassing of specific incidents that can challenge accepted orthodoxies and provide the material for new perspectives on the past. Martin refers to her work as "historical detective work". By this she means a concern with the ignored or overlooked details of the lives of individuals, a project of uncovering the kind of subjugated knowledge that Foucault described as central to the project of historical genealogy.