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Any recommendations on a general history of Puerto Rico?
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Jun 30, 2021 15:55
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A Dapper Walrus posted:Any recommendations on a general history of Puerto Rico? Maybe not quite a general history, but my friend wrote this history of Puerto Rican workers' organization after 1898 that's coming out in November, so going to take the opportunity to promote it: https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-lettered-barriada
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Jun 30, 2021 16:03
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Global Disorder posted:I can't help you with the military side, but Japanese historian Masayoshi Matsumura has two books about Japan's public diplomacy during the conflict: Baron Suematsu in Europe During the Russo-Japanese War and Baron Kaneko and the Russo-Japanese War. Very readable histories of two Meiji leaders attempting to convince Americans and British that Japan represented the West in a war against Asian barbarism. And their troubles dealing with the yellow peril idea that was spread around the time. Nah, that's great. If you've got any recommendations for social histories of Japan and Korea around that time, that'd be even better.
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Jun 30, 2021 17:07
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Any recs for crazy bonkers WWII intelligence stories?
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Jul 5, 2021 04:58
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Fighting Trousers posted:Any recs for crazy bonkers WWII intelligence stories? Agent Zigzag was a fun one, but the tone is definitely more pop-history than actual history book. Fun look into the British Double-Cross system though.
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Jul 5, 2021 08:04
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Picked up "The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company" and I'm pretty stoked to read it and get incredibly mad. https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Relentless-Rise-India-Company/dp/1408864371
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Jul 22, 2021 00:35
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Is there a go-to corrective/alternative to "Guns, Germs, and Steel" that doesn't veer into geographic determinism?
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Jul 23, 2021 12:24
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Lawman 0 posted:Picked up "The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company" and I'm pretty stoked to read it and get incredibly mad. I read that earlier this year and it's equal parts infuriating and entertaining.
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Jul 23, 2021 13:48
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webmeister posted:I read that earlier this year and it's equal parts infuriating and entertaining. The lament of mughal officials wondering how they lost to a bunch of people who couldn't wash their butts is just. 
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Jul 23, 2021 14:57
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Where can I learn as much detail about life in the Antebellum South as possible? I don't mind academic or dry.
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Jul 27, 2021 06:49
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Bandiet posted:Where can I learn as much detail about life in the Antebellum South as possible? I don't mind academic or dry. I liked River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson, on how the cotton economy worked.
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Jul 27, 2021 09:55
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Bandiet posted:Where can I learn as much detail about life in the Antebellum South as possible? I don't mind academic or dry. One book that I like to recommend is Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic by Erskine Clarke. It's a nonfiction account of a slave-owning family in SE Georgia, based on the family's letters, that follows them for several decades, up to the Civil War. What is interesting about it is that the author also tries to reconstruct the lives and lifestyles of the slaves on the plantation and in the surrounding area as well. Obviously, there are fewer surviving letters and other primary documents for the enslaved population, but the author still gives a comprehensive view of what life would have been like for those people at those times in those places. Two main reasons I like to recommend it for people interested in reading about the antebellum South: 1) The situation is different in south-east Georgia than in some of the more famous areas in cotton country. The economy has different drivers, and the relationship between the white and black populations is somewhat different. For example, during the hot season, the slave-owning whites would all move to their coastal houses for better weather. The enslaved groups would be left basically on their own on the farming land; the health conditions were obviously worse, but they were not directly supervised by the white families for several months of the year, which led to differences in their own way of life. 2) The book follows a long enough period of time that the reader can see the changes that occurred. First off is the regionally increasing dominance of the cotton economy, where families in the SE Georgia region ended up moving themselves or their enslaved people to regions farther inland that would be more profitable, but which also disrupted all of the societal systems that the whites had built to try to convince themselves that they were actually "helping" their enslaved population. Not that those justifications were legitimate, but through the letters and documents, the reader can see the whites of the time being forced to face a bit more of the naked injustice of the system. The second big change is the run up to the Civil War, where the white populations become MUCH more reactionary ("How dare the Yankees tell me how to run my plantation!") very quickly, both younger and older generations. And then when the Civil War actually reaches the region, the total disruption of the enslaved communities happens as people become mobile and the white populations are faced with that their former enslaved people actually thought of them.
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Jul 27, 2021 16:22
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Very cool, thank you both.
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Jul 28, 2021 05:16
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grassy gnoll posted:Any general recommendations about the Russo-Japanese War? I realized most of what I know about it comes from histories of the 1905 Revolution and felt real dumb for a bit there. I learned a lot about that from Edmund Morris’ Theodore Roosevelt books. The scale of Russian bungling was ridiculous, I didn’t know the redeployment of their Baltic Fleet was hampered by the decision to almost start a war with the UK after opening fire on fishing boats they mistook for Japanese torpedo boats. In the North Sea.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:52
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Finished the new Carter biography The Outlier, which is generally pretty good for an overview of the Carter presidency. My main takeaway is that Zbigniew Brzezinski was an absolute idiot and Carter would have been far better to have him no where near the white house. Its astonishing just how bad the iranian hostage rescue attempt was.
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Aug 2, 2021 00:52
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Lawman 0 posted:Picked up "The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company" and I'm pretty stoked to read it and get incredibly mad. Reading this now and it's good. Is there a "sequel" that discusses the late EIC period and the Raj in similar detail?
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Aug 2, 2021 04:26
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I'd like to thank whoever recommended King Leopold's Ghost a thousand pages ago. My dyslexia makes reading a real challenge, so it's taken me months to get through, but it was well worth it.
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Aug 2, 2021 08:43
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Any recommendations on the Paris Commune?
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Aug 2, 2021 13:17
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The Paris Commune of 1871 by Frank Jellinek Pretty sure it's public domain and you can find it on archive.org.
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Aug 2, 2021 14:06
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clean ayers act posted:Finished the new Carter biography The Outlier, which is generally pretty good for an overview of the Carter presidency. My main takeaway is that Zbigniew Brzezinski was an absolute idiot and Carter would have been far better to have him no where near the white house. Its astonishing just how bad the iranian hostage rescue attempt was. Ooh sounds good just placed a hold via library
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Aug 3, 2021 05:02
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Bandiet posted:Where can I learn as much detail about life in the Antebellum South as possible? I don't mind academic or dry. I'd check out some of Eugene Genovese's work like Roll, Jordon, Roll or The World Slaveholders Made, and the associated debates regarding his work.
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Aug 3, 2021 17:35
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Any recommendations on books about Operation Gladio and other stay behind networks in Europe after the second world war? I found 'Natos Secret Armies' by Daniele Ganser but he seems to be an idiot.
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Aug 5, 2021 09:39
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Paul Williams' Operation Gladio is one I'd recommend because it includes details that are otherwise omitted or glossed over by more mainstream critical histories of the CIA, and it largely refutes the CIA's rationale that these were stay-behind networks designed to be vanguards in a potential Soviet invasion of Europe. With Gladio you're dealing with a lot of conjecture with respect to institutions like IOR that are basically a black box, but I found the book to be really detailed regardless.
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Aug 5, 2021 15:42
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They just declassified the archives, so hopefully we get a full account in the nearish future.
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Aug 7, 2021 02:13
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Reading The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge based on the thread's recommendation and while it's fairly interesting it still feels pretty biased in favor of the Franks just based on how he frames certain things and poses some of his arguments. Too bad, but still probably better than most histories on the subject I'd find I guess.
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Aug 7, 2021 16:39
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Punkin Spunkin posted:Reading The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge based on the thread's recommendation and while it's fairly interesting it still feels pretty biased in favor of the Franks just based on how he frames certain things and poses some of his arguments. Too bad, but still probably better than most histories on the subject I'd find I guess. There's always The Crusades through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf. That's the only anglophone book on the subject from a non-Western-European perspective I've encountered so far. I enjoyed reading it, and it is definitely not biased in favor of the Franks.
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Aug 7, 2021 22:05
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Yeah I remember reading that a while back and enjoying its perspective. This "authoritative history" has still been fairly entertaining I guess.
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Aug 7, 2021 22:40
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I thought Dan Jones' Crusaders was interesting, though definitly pop history
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Aug 8, 2021 02:55
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Oh lmao, don't read the amazon reviews of that bookquote:1.0 out of 5 stars Pseudo Historic, Politically motivated nonsense quote:2.0 out of 5 stars Woke Opinionated History Actually a pretty good sign for any books about the crusades lol
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Aug 8, 2021 02:58
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Lolol imagine being furious about the so called elegance of Islamic coins
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Aug 8, 2021 05:43
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Lolol imagine being furious about the so called elegance of Islamic coins  just hideous  so inelegant  ahh, beautiful wisconsingreg fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Aug 8, 2021 |
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Aug 8, 2021 06:30
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If it doesn't have a picture of Jesus is it even a coin?
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Aug 8, 2021 07:04
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quote:If you want to read an opinionated and woke history of the crusades, this is the book for you. Yes. And?
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Aug 9, 2021 21:15
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I don't have or know of any good books about the politics and society of Imperial Japan. Explanation of how Japan differed from European fascism would be helpful. Suggestions?
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Aug 13, 2021 12:44
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FPyat posted:I don't have or know of any good books about the politics and society of Imperial Japan. Explanation of how Japan differed from European fascism would be helpful. Suggestions? Imperial Japan during WWII, you mean? This is not really what you're looking for, but I'm going to recommend it anyway.....Eri Hotta's Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, which is about the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor, and how it came about, and looking at that decision is a good way in microcosm to see the internal logic and the essential disfunction of the Japanese state and decision making process during the war.
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Aug 13, 2021 15:41
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Vasukhani posted:
This is a person who has never studied history at even the most basic level of taking a first-year undergraduate survey course.
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Aug 13, 2021 16:26
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Any recs for a good overview of the English Civil War?
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Aug 14, 2021 01:28
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vyelkin posted:This is a person who has never studied history at even the most basic level of taking a first-year undergraduate survey course. History, like the news, is the completely objective recitation of a series of Facts(TM) from which any deviation results in revisionist (sic) history and fake news.
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Aug 14, 2021 01:52
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Epicurius posted:Imperial Japan during WWII, you mean? Japan between 1906 and 1941, mostly.
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Aug 14, 2021 02:54
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Fighting Trousers posted:Any recs for a good overview of the English Civil War? I went through my orals list on modern and early modern Britain to see what I had on it, and all of these I would recommend, though they're all pretty much just backgrounds to how the war broke out: Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (1990) Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (2001) Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1700 (2000) Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550-1640 (2000) David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion: popular politics and culture in England, 1603-1660 Mark Kishlansky, A monarchy transformed: Britain, 1603-1714
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Aug 14, 2021 04:09
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