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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Revolutions is fantastic and I cannot emphasize enough how much better Mike Duncan is compared to Dan Carlin. But taking on the Russian Revolution in podcast forum is a gigantic undertaking and will probably take him like 100 episodes. Dan "The World Would Be Better if the Central Power Won WW1 and Put Down the Bolsheviks" Carlin
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# ? May 17, 2021 22:11 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:38 |
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I'm looking for recommendations for books on two subjects: The Indonesian war of liberation from the Netherlands in the 1940's. and Something about the officially sanctioned non-SED political parties in East Germany. Could be a historical overview, or interviews with members of the parties, or whatever. Thanks!
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# ? May 17, 2021 22:52 |
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Vasukhani posted:Dan "The World Would Be Better if the Central Power Won WW1 and Put Down the Bolsheviks" Carlin I’m now very glad I never listened to his WWI series. I knew it was bad in a lot of more minor ways but drat. That’s straight out of Neil Ferguson’s mouth.
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# ? May 18, 2021 02:53 |
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Vasukhani posted:Dan "The World Would Be Better if the Central Power Won WW1 and Put Down the Bolsheviks" Carlin i mean, the Central Powers are in large part responsible for the Bolsheviks being in power, all the way down to shipping Lenin in to destabilize the new Russian government. So it's a weird counterfactional.
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# ? May 18, 2021 14:03 |
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Not to mention the Central Powers did keep fighting the Bolsheviks for the first six months or so and decided to make peace instead, specifically to try to then commit their forces to victory in the west.
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# ? May 18, 2021 14:12 |
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Chairman Capone posted:Not to mention the Central Powers did keep fighting the Bolsheviks for the first six months or so and decided to make peace instead, specifically to try to then commit their forces to victory in the west. I'd say it was more the other way around. Trotsky deliberately delayed the peace talks both because the Soviets didn't want to lose Russian territory, and because the Bolsheviks hoped that there would be Communist revolutions in the Central Powers. The Central Powers were pretty eager to stop fighting the Bolsheviks and move west. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was only signed after the German chief negotiator said 'Sign the treaty or we end the cease fire and start the offensive again."
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# ? May 18, 2021 15:08 |
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just went to gettysburg and id like to find a good book on it. i am going to assume the Stephen Sears one is probably the best one? i know he picks apart that lovely gettysburg movie.
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# ? May 19, 2021 04:24 |
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Dapper_Swindler posted:just went to gettysburg and id like to find a good book on it. i am going to assume the Stephen Sears one is probably the best one? i know he picks apart that lovely gettysburg movie. Stars in their Courses is quite good, especially if you can get the audio version.
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# ? May 19, 2021 10:52 |
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Can any of you recommend a good book on the Indus Valley civilization?
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# ? May 19, 2021 11:49 |
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Arbite posted:Stars in their Courses is quite good, especially if you can get the audio version. quote:While Foote has been praised as an engaging commentator on the Civil War, his sympathy toward Lost Cause viewpoints and his rejection of traditional scholarly standards of academic history have seen his work reappraised and criticized, as well as defended, in recent years. [26] I'm debating reading this man's three volume set on the Civil War and I can see I'm going to have to keep my eyes wide open. e: This led me to read this remarkable article, which I recommend: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/why-do-so-few-blacks-study-the-civil-war/308831/ StrixNebulosa fucked around with this message at 14:02 on May 19, 2021 |
# ? May 19, 2021 13:54 |
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Foote's weird. He's definitely writing with one hand when it comes to the Confederacy, but A) he's pretty good at creating a fluent historical narrative and B) his books dominated the field of study for a good couple of decades, so he's an important read for the historiography of the Civil War. That said, if you're just looking for material on the war itself, pitch Foote into the trash and pick up McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. It does everything Foote's books do better, in a single volume, and without the abiding love of slavers.
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# ? May 19, 2021 14:24 |
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Foote can be forgiven for being from the South and writing his trilogy in the 50s but he never evolved in his views up to his death.
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# ? May 19, 2021 16:00 |
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Arbite posted:Stars in their Courses is quite good, especially if you can get the audio version. It's on YouTube. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPUOWUY0Tf6u2xe4uP_YVMAQCwYmfy6ni I read Foote's volumes last year and would recommend them within the limited context of military history. My only real exposure to this period before Foote were Sven Beckert and Edward Baptist's histories on slavery and its role in the development of industrial capitalism in America and lots of Ambrose Bierce. I would definitely recommend brushing up on slavery and all the maneuvers of the slave power from at least the 1830s onward whether through those histories or primary sources before getting into Foote because it helped me stay very critical throughout all three volumes. His biggest deficiencies aside from the various Lost Cause flirtations are that he deals with slavery only very tangentially and even then it's typically conciliatory towards the south (he often uses "servant" when referring to a chattel slave, for instance). That and a generally pervasive bourgeois propriety where, say, Sherman destroying infrastructure and war materiel is presented with maximum effrontery on the one hand, whereas Foote is totally silent on poo poo like Andersonville or Albert Jenkins' brigade kidnapping free black people en route to Gettysburg on the other hand. Also the general hagiography of Forrest which includes an incredibly dishonest portrayal of the Fort Pillow massacre. That said, he's probably the most evenhanded southern historian of the war from this period for whatever that's worth, and he's an excellent stylist so the volumes are remarkably easy reads in that sense. But again I would only recommend him in the limited context of presenting a stylish military history and you definitely wanna have an accurate sense of what slavery and the slave power were like before reading him.
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# ? May 19, 2021 16:02 |
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grassy gnoll posted:Foote's weird. He's definitely writing with one hand when it comes to the Confederacy, but A) he's pretty good at creating a fluent historical narrative and B) his books dominated the field of study for a good couple of decades, so he's an important read for the historiography of the Civil War. Picking up Battle Cry of Freedom, thank you!
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# ? May 19, 2021 16:08 |
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Good choice, Battle Cry is awesome.
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# ? May 19, 2021 16:36 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:Picking up Battle Cry of Freedom, thank you! Battle Cry of Freedom is not only the best one volume book on the Civil War ever it is also IMO one of the very best history books ever. It's a pretty complete and thorough introduction to the subject and paints a great picture of the people and events and the world in which they lived and happened. He uses a ton of primary sources and it's telling that half the book is setting the stage for the war and the war itself seems almost like a footnote or something. It's a good audiobook too if that's your thing. Foote is very very much a product of his time and his background and upbringing, and needs to be viewed that way. He's a fantastic writer and his historical errors are mostly errors of omission (esp. re: slavery, southern atrocities as others have noted). I think his work is especially important in how it influenced popular perceptions of the ACW for another generation or two after/during civil rights, and its worth reading, but read Battle Cry of Freedom first
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# ? May 19, 2021 18:08 |
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Battlecry is the best one volume account period and should always be the first stop. But if you then want to read a much more military focused account afterwards I would recommend A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War.
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# ? May 19, 2021 18:12 |
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Yeah, I'm reading Battlecry right now. I am at John Browns execution. The southerners are very put upon!
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# ? May 19, 2021 22:46 |
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Got Battle Cry, reading it after my current book. Thanks thread
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# ? May 19, 2021 23:00 |
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Foote can be forgiven for being from the South and writing his trilogy in the 50s but he never evolved in his views up to his death. I will join the chorus recommending Battle Cry of Freedom, though, particularly the ~300 pages or so (roughly the first third) of material before Sumter. I'll also throw out a recommendation for Eicher's The Longest Night if you want a single volume more focused on the military side of the Civil War. I think McPherson's very good on the social and political stuff and just so-so on the military side--not just the battles, but the larger operational details--while Eicher mostly glosses over the bigger picture stuff (although he does find time to make the standard gestures, e.g. inserting the standard quotes from the standard diarists, because heaven forfend that a volume on the Civil War declines to quote Mary loving Chestnut) but pulls more stuff about the operational-level stuff from primary sources. There are obviously plenty of other books on the subject, but Eicher more or less set out to write a milhist companion to Battle Cry of Freedom (and McPherson writes the forward) so it's a fairly natural pairing if you want one.
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# ? May 19, 2021 23:48 |
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Comparing Foote to loving Goebbels is quite a take.
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# ? May 20, 2021 00:26 |
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Comparing Foote to loving Goebbels is quite a take. The Lost Cause mythology isn't just some abstract fact of the Southern landscape that inevitably and unavoidably imprints itself upon blameless Southerners all unawares. It's something that was conjured into existence by propagandists pushing back first against Reconstruction and later, like Foote, against the nascent Civil Rights Movement. The thing we're being asked to "forgive" Foote for isn't a side effect, it isn't some implicit bias or ideological blind spot. It's an intentional effect of Foote's work. It's his goal. He likes the Confederacy. He thinks that the Confederacy stood for "substantially good" things. He's not a product of his times, he's one of the propagandists who actively worked to make the times what they were.
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# ? May 20, 2021 00:47 |
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Then a far more accurate comparison is that he’s a David Irving.
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# ? May 20, 2021 03:08 |
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I don't think David Irving comes up every time someone asks for recommendations for books about the Holocaust, and I don't think I've ever seen someone say that you have to forgive David Irving for being a Holocaust denier because he's just a product of his times.
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# ? May 20, 2021 03:29 |
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Battle Cry of Freedom is not only the best one volume book on the Civil War ever it is also IMO one of the very best history books ever. It's a pretty complete and thorough introduction to the subject and paints a great picture of the people and events and the world in which they lived and happened. He uses a ton of primary sources and it's telling that half the book is setting the stage for the war and the war itself seems almost like a footnote or something. It's a good audiobook too if that's your thing. Battle Cry of Freedom is part of the Oxford History of the United States series, so it's designed to slot into the 1848-1865 (ish) period. McPherson's Ordeal by Fire is more directly focused on the military end of the Civil War, if that's your bag.
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# ? May 20, 2021 04:22 |
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SubG posted:I don't think we should forgive the chief propagandist of the Confederacy because he's from the South any more than we should forgive Goebbels just because he was from Germany. My favorite goon takes are the ones that are 8,000 miles over the line. Here's a nice quotation from the Bibliographical Note of the second volume, published in 1963. Shelby Foote's Civil War History, vol. 2 posted:...I am obligated also to the governors of my native state [Mississippi] and the adjoining states of Arkansas and Alabama for helping to lessen my sectional bias by reproducing, in their actions during several of the years that went into the writing of this volume, much that was least admirable in the position my forebears occupied when they stood up to Lincoln. I suppose, or in any case fervently hope, it is true that history never repeats itself, but I know from watching these three gentlemen that it can be terrifying in its approximations, even when the reproduction - deriving, as it does, its scale from the performers - is in miniature. This gives a taste of the reasons to read his series: thoughtful work by a fantastic prose stylist who has life and cultural experiences very different from you, the 202x reader, and who was taking care to present them in what to him seemed like a balanced fashion, rather than as a work of polemic. Obviously we are all going to have major disagreements with someone who was in favor of keeping the Confederate battle flag as a cultural symbol, as he was on record for, but it's also helpful in this era of Internet echo chambers to read work by someone intelligent who doesn't entirely agree with you. Goebbels, or the chief propagandist of the Confederacy, he definitely is not.
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# ? May 20, 2021 06:03 |
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Lewd Mangabey posted:My favorite goon takes are the ones that are 8,000 miles over the line. If someone constructs a narrative to persuade you about some political point of view, using emotional language instead of arguing from the facts, what do you call it if not propaganda? You yourself seem to be suggesting that you object to the content of the ideas, but recommend his work because you find the form compelling. Again: what do we call this if not propaganda? And if it's propaganda, then he's somebody who's sold hundreds of thousands of books supporting this particular set of ideas. He's reached literally tens of millions more by being in the Ken Burns documentary series. He's one of the single most recognisable Civil War historians to most people, probably one of the most recognisable historian period. His work gets cited favourably even today, in 2021...in places like this thread, as well as by e.g. the Sons of Confederate Veterans opposing the removal of Confederate monuments. If he's not the chief propagandist of the Confederacy, then who's a better candidate today? What unapologetic pro-Confederate voice gets repeated and cited as frequently? What other pro-Confederate writer is defended as stridently, both by other pro-Confederate voices as well as those who purport to deplore the Confederacy? If he's not the chief propagandist of the Confederacy, then he is certainly its most durable and most mainstream. This conversation, and other similar ones which have taken place in this very thread, is evidence for this. As for writing in a "balanced fashion", uh...there's a lot of ways to describe calling Nathan Bedford Forrest "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history", but I don't think "balanced" is the word I'd use. Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (an organization for which Foote has much more...nuanced...feelings than most people) is someone that Foote places alongside Lincoln as one of the "two authentic geniuses" of the Civil War. And of course there's the fact that he said he'd literally fight for the Confederacy...in 1997: Interview in the Paris Review, 1997 posted:INTERVIEWER Again, there's a couple ways I'd characterise saying ""The Confederates fought for some substantially good things," but "balanced" is not one of them.
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# ? May 20, 2021 09:03 |
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SubG posted:
Confederate soldiers fought for an awful lot of different and nuanced reasons (mostly to do with maintaining the institutions of slavery, for sure!) and for anyone interested in those reasons, I would highly recommend General Lee's Army by Joseph Glatthaar. It's got a ton of social history and research about the actual confederate soldiers in the Army of Northern VA and it was a really fascinating read for me.
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# ? May 20, 2021 14:25 |
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Here's another fun Foote quote:quote:Eight years later, in Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, Tony Horwitz quoted Foote saying: ‘Slavery was the first great sin of this nation. The second great sin was emancipation, or rather the way it was done . . . What has dismayed me so much is the behaviour of blacks. They are fulfilling every dire prophecy the Ku Klux Klan made. It’s no longer safe to be on the streets in black neighbourhoods. They are acting as if the utter lies about blacks being somewhere between ape and man are true.’ Personally I don't want to read a book about the Civil War from Mr. "I'm not racist, but"
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# ? May 20, 2021 14:46 |
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:This quote gets brought up alot about Shelby Foote and I think it gets misconstrued. The 'today if the circumstances were similar' bit in that quote is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting, but it's always been my reading that he's saying 'if I'd been born in Mississippi in 1840 and lived there in 1863, I would absolutely be fighting for the confederacy because that's what basically every white male of military age did because they believed XYZ and were raised in ZYX culture' and not saying 'I, as a person in 1997, would fight for the confederacy tomorrow because I believe it had a just cause and slavery was good.' Maybe that's an overgenerous interpretation. Foote definitely didn't mature a ton intellectually and got more reactionary in his old age, which is also unfortunately when he got a ton of press and notoriety from the Ken Burns thing. I won't try to defend Foote as any less or more racist or Lost Cause-ist than any other southerner born in 1915, but I think his work is still very important, especially in the context of the influence it had on popular perceptions of the war. Considering what he goes on to say about Nathan Bedford Forrest in the very same interview, I think this is way too generous. quote:INTERVIEWER
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# ? May 20, 2021 15:20 |
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Foote definitely has a Homeric conception of Forrest and I would argue the southern planter aristocracy more generally (at least where Jefferson Davis is concerned) that becomes more prevalent in the three volumes as they go along and seemed to only get worse as he got older. Forrest I think is where the hagiography is at its worst because his coverage of Fort Pillow hinges on a very obvious lie by omission. One of Forrest's own sargeants who took part in the massacre wrote a letter home and mentions that Forrest ordered the surrendered black troops "shot down like dogs." Foote quotes from this letter but omits that part and tries to absolve Forrest by saying "well Sherman said Forrest wasn't responsible and obviously Sherman would have had no love for Forrest." But obviously Sherman wasn't there and this sargeant was so it's just really transparent and gross on Foote's part to not have to reckon with the reality of someone he idolized and what those implications are for the south, the Confederacy, etc. I got the impression from Foote's history that he felt very little shame about the war and what it meant that this incredibly bloody war was prosecuted for the benefit of a few hundred thousand slaver aristocrat families. But I also found that lack of shame useful for helping to explain the southern mindset around the war that still predominates in the south today. I'm from the birthplace of secesh and obviously what little you learn about the war in public schools here is dogshit. I doubt Foote would have the same purchase for someone from outside the south but ymmv.
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# ? May 20, 2021 15:49 |
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What I'm hearing is that read Foote if you've already read better/non-pro-slavery histories and want to look at the Lost Cause myth and see what pro-Confederate southerners think of the war. Which is a valuable resource but not something to start with.
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# ? May 20, 2021 16:03 |
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Shelby Foote posted:Forrest himself was never a bloodthirsty sort of man who enjoyed slaughter. He also took better care of his soldiers and his black teamsters than any other general I know of. He was a man who at the age of sixteen had to raise six younger brothers and sisters after the death of his blacksmith father. He became a slave trader because that was a way of making enough money to support all those people and to get wealthy. Forrest was worth about a million dollars when the war started, an alderman for the city of Memphis. He was by no means some cracker who came out of nowhere. All writers will have great sympathy with Forrest for something he said. He did not like to write and there are very few Forrest letters. He said, I never see a pen but I think of a snake. "Sure he was a slave trader but it's not a big deal, he was only doing it to get wealthy" is also one hell of a take. God drat Shelby Foote sucked. Like part of me wishes he were alive today so we could ask for his ironically entertaining takes on MAGA chuds, but on the other hand good riddance.
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# ? May 20, 2021 17:37 |
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Reading Foote to get a view of southern opinion in the 50s is a round about way to rationalize reading something I got to admit. It’s like reading Gibbons to learn about English views in the 19th century. You could but you are better off just looking up histories that deal with that directly.
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# ? May 20, 2021 19:50 |
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quote:Foote had never been trained in the traditional scholarly standards of academic historical research, which emphasized archives and footnotes. Instead he visited battlefields.[9] He read widely, using standard biographies and campaign studies as well as recent books by Hudson Strode, Bruce Catton, James G. Randall, Clifford Dowdey, T. Harry Williams, Kenneth M. Stampp and Allan Nevins.[21] He did not footnote his secondary sources nor use the archives but instead mined the primary sources in the 128-volume Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.[16] Foote described himself as a "novelist-historian" who accepted "the historian’s standards without his paraphernalia" and "employed the novelist’s methods without his license."[16][22] Foote deliberately avoided the use of footnotes, arguing that "they would detract from the book's narrative quality by intermittently shattering the illusion that the observer is not so much reading a book as sharing an experience".[23] He argued that footnotes would have "totally shattered what I was doing. I didn't want people glancing down at the bottom of the page every other sentence".[24] Foote concluded that most historians are "so concerned with finding out what happened that they make the enormous mistake of equating facts with truth...you can't get the truth from facts. The truth is the way you feel about it".[25] lmao please do not read this book
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# ? May 20, 2021 20:25 |
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:This quote gets brought up alot about Shelby Foote and I think it gets misconstrued. The 'today if the circumstances were similar' bit in that quote is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting, but it's always been my reading that he's saying 'if I'd been born in Mississippi in 1840 and lived there in 1863, I would absolutely be fighting for the confederacy because that's what basically every white male of military age did because they believed XYZ and were raised in ZYX culture' and not saying 'I, as a person in 1997, would fight for the confederacy tomorrow because I believe it had a just cause and slavery was good.' Maybe that's an overgenerous interpretation. But at very best I think this is disingenuous. Foote's engaging in a rhetorical shell game where he dismisses complicated objections about support for the Confederacy as "political correctness" and asserts a simple political ideology held by a putative "raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn't even read the Constitution", and then asserts that his position is the same as this illiterate Confederate. But he's not some raggedy illiterate Confederate. He can't just plead ignorance. At the time of that interview he'd been writing and speaking, professionally, about the Civil War for around 40 years. He'd gotten the lion's share of screen time in the Ken Burns documentary series. The whole reason why the interview was happening in the first place was because he was, at the time, considered an expert on the subject. So the act in which he hand-waves away all of the complications of the position and just says aw shucks I'm just a simple Suthron boy isn't an excuse. It's not an explanation. At best it's evasion, and in practice it's the bedrock for the entire ~*heritage not hate*~ defence of the Confederacy, which expects us to leave aside any ethical or moral questions we might have and just accept the majesty of a Southern white ethnostate simply because it's "traditional". I mean we could dig in further on this, both on his word choice and on unpacking all of the embedded layers of implication in Foote's entire line of argument here, but like I say I strongly think that it's the opposite of exculpatory, even accepting that Foote's intended reading of the sentiment is the one you suggest. Because here's the thing: doesn't matter. I don't think we need to engage in a lot of narrow parsing of motivations to condemn somebody for openly stating that he'd fight to preserve slavery. All rationalisations along those lines are lovely on their own merits, they were lovely in their original historical context, they were lovely as part of the system of rationalisations in Jim Crow South, they were lovely as a revanchist reaction against the Civil Rights movement, and they're lovely today when they find their way into the mouths of tiki torch-wielding neonazis opposing the removal of Confederate monuments. My reaction to all of this is gently caress him. Not forgive him because he's just a guy from the South. Not let's just accept that he was a man of his time. No. It was bullshit then. It's bullshit now. And it was bullshit at every moment in between when he was given a pass for whatever reason.
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# ? May 20, 2021 20:55 |
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Here are some other fun Foote quotes:quote:Speaking in 1989, Foote stated that "this black separatist movement is a bunch of junk", believing that African-Americans should model themselves on Jews, who Foote believed had a talent for making money. Foote, however, believed "the odds against" black people were to be "too great" for them to succeed in the US, as a result of "having a different color skin". Foote maintained that the KKK of the 1920s was "mostly anti-Catholic, incidentally anti-Semitic and really was not much concerned about the Negro".[44] quote:In 1986, Foote strongly denounced the Memphis chapter of the NAACP in their campaign for the removal of the Nathan Bedford Forrest Monument in Memphis, accusing them of anti-white prejudice: "the day that black people admire Forrest as much as I do is the day when they will be free and equal, for they will have gotten prejudice out of their minds as we whites are trying to get it out of ours."[47] Foote argued in favor of "the Confederate flag flying anywhere anybody wants to fly it at any time. If they have a referendum in a state that says ‘Take the flag down off the state capitol,’ I think they ought to take the flag down. But the flag to me represents many noble things."[48] quote:Foote remained adamant that slavery was not a major cause of the Civil War, stating in 2001 that "no soldier on either side gave a drat about the slaves—they were fighting for other reasons entirely in their minds."[20] quote:Foote campaigned in the 2001 referendum on the Flag of Mississippi, arguing against a proposal which would have replaced the Confederate battle flag with a blue canton with 20 stars.[60] Foote rejected the Confederate flag's association with white supremacy and argued "I’m for the Confederate flag always and forever. Many among the finest people this country has ever produced died in that war. To take it and call it a symbol of evil is a misrepresentation."[61] Frankly, I wouldn't trust this man to tell me the time of day. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 21:11 on May 20, 2021 |
# ? May 20, 2021 21:08 |
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Welp yeah he’s way worse than I thought.
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# ? May 20, 2021 23:53 |
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CharlestheHammer posted:Reading Foote to get a view of southern opinion in the 50s is a round about way to rationalize reading something I got to admit. Read C. Vann Woodward instead.
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# ? May 21, 2021 00:02 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:38 |
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Yeah I knew about the flag defending and getting even more enamored of Forrest as he got into the '90s and '00s but As for unambiguously good Civil War coverage that's snappy and concise, I would highly recommend Karl Marx's articles in Die Presse. They were essentially primers for an Austrian audience who would have been unfamiliar with the goings on in America. In his typical fashion Marx both anticipates and refutes a lot of Lost Cause arguments. They don't seem to be available online anymore but they're all collected in The Civil War in the United States.
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# ? May 21, 2021 00:11 |