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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:-The Assyrians in the latter years kept relocating the capital, and building newer and larger cities to act as the imperial center, with Nineveh being the last. A sign of decadence? I think it's more a sign that the seat of power is shifting. The Romans had a lot of capital cities in the empire as the empire started fragmenting worse and worse after the 3rd century. Interesting book from the way you describe it. I don't think anyone who knows anything about the Assyrians is going to go in expecting something nice or pleasant to read about they had a reputation after all.
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Feb 27, 2024 13:00
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Ithle01 posted:Interesting book from the way you describe it. I don't think anyone who knows anything about the Assyrians is going to go in expecting something nice or pleasant to read about they had a reputation after all. Well, what's interesting to me is that it's a tendency of contemporary historians to "downplay" whatever it is they devote their lives to studying. Every contemporary historian I read has a kind of apologetic tone, almost like their identity is tied up with what they devote their lives to, so just saying "Assyria was bad" is impossible – you have to say something like "well, yes, Assyria basically committed the Trail of Tears on a regular basis, but they had a great system of roads!" and act like there's some moral equivalence there. I think part of it might be distance in time – everything seems morally neutral when it happened in the past for some reason – and part of it is a kind of default contrarianism that's expected of the scholar (to be a scholar interfacing with the public is always to tell people something surprising or that goes against their expectations). Part of it also might be that if you study something for long enough, your identity gets deeply bound up in it, so just being repulsed by it or condemning it becomes impossible because you personally are interested in it or have stakes in it. The thing is, it doesn't work, because the weird equivocal and apologetic tone ("maybe the Assyrian deportations weren't so bad?"") obviously contradicts the actual material you're presenting. Nerdburger_Jansen fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 17:55
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I am neck deep in contract writing so this probably wont be as clear as I want it to be, but as someone who does archaeology imo most of that may be an institutionlized reaction to how god drat bad the general public perceives the past. If you don't have that caveat/exception they will, unless they are (comparatively) well read into the topic, take the single bad factoid about so and so doing one bad thing and use it to paint the entire society throughout the ages up to and including modern times with modern descendant groups. Please believe me when I say this happens all the time. I've got to be reaally loving careful about what I say about things to the public, because Joe and Jane from Ohio or Spain or whatever are going to hear "human sacrifice" and take that as their big take away and interpretation of a culture instead of the ingenuous architectural designs which passively redirect and conserve water. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 20:02
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I finally finished The Burgundians A Vanished Empire and it's such a wonderful book. I though the prose was beautiful. I don't expect that when I seek out a book, subject is more important to me, but it sure makes the reading experience enjoyable. I had a smile on my face most of the time reading it. And now I'm tempted to load up Europa Universalist again Mr_Roke fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 21:01
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:Well, what's interesting to me is that it's a tendency of contemporary historians to "downplay" whatever it is they devote their lives to studying. Every contemporary historian I read has a kind of apologetic tone, almost like their identity is tied up with what they devote their lives to, so just saying "Assyria was bad" is impossible – you have to say something like "well, yes, Assyria basically committed the Trail of Tears on a regular basis, but they had a great system of roads!" and act like there's some moral equivalence there. I haven't really had this experience with reading contemporary history and, honestly, I think that most contemporary history is significantly better than that written in the past, but that's just what I've been reading. If you read about any group of humans you will inevitably get to some messed up stuff. The Assyrians might be a bit worse than some, but they're not that exceptional. Then again I haven't read this book so for all I know the author really did try to whitewash this. Overall, how was it though? Because I'm looking for some stuff to read this Summer.
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Feb 27, 2024 21:53
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Mr_Roke posted:I finally finished The Burgundians A Vanished Empire and it's such a wonderful book. i enjoyed Bart's enthusiasm on the Rest is History podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6TnD0YsQB7DbY1dxkmOqYh
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Feb 28, 2024 02:08
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The stuff with trying to argue against the severity of Assyrian atrocities comes in large part from people writing in response to the traditionally dominant narrative of Assyria that is based on Biblical sources, which present Assyria as the greatest evil the world has ever seen, and trying to contextualize the Biblical account with a more balanced picture that makes heavy use of the documents from the Assyrians themselves. This effort can certainly go to far, but it doesn't serve any useful purpose if we just read the Biblical account of Assyria as the greatest evil to ever exist at face value without trying to critically assess these ideas based on all the other available evidence (as past generations of scholars often did). A lot of the most aggressive "whitewashing" of Assyrian atrocities comes out of the work of Karen Radner, and checking my copy of the book, she is the person who Frahm cites in the footnote on page 148 were he talks about other scholars who have argued for the use of the term "resettlement" rather than "deportation." That's something proposed by Radner that has not achieved much support from others, including Frahm himself (in the following line Frahm says "this view might be overly generous"). And even Radner certainly acknowledges the brutal nature of Assyrian deportations, despite wanting to reframe how they are understood by scholars today. Radner has spent a lot of her career studying the intellectual and scholarly culture of the Assyrians, and she has spent a lot of her time pushing back aggressively against the traditionally dominant view of Assyria as a primarily militaristic empire of uncultured brutes (which is largely based on studies of the Bible and Assyrian royal inscriptions). A lot of other scholars in the field would agree that she sometimes goes too far in this argument, but her work, and the work of others who are of like mind with her, has been very influential in pushing back on the older (biblically based) narrative of Assyria as a uniquely hyper-militarized society. And her work, and the work of others, on Assyrian deportations has revealed some very important insights that previous generations of scholars had failed to realize because of their unwarranted assumptions about Assyria. Older scholarship tended to assume a priori that Assyrian deportees were enslaved. Radner and others have shown through careful study of administrative records relating to deportees in the Assyrian heartland that this isn't true -- they actually had the same legal status, from the perspective of the state administration, that ethnic Assyrians who are recorded in the same documents did, and there are examples that can be seen in administrative documents of deportees who hold privileged and high paying positions. This is a case where earlier scholarship had been deeply biased by the Biblical narrative and stereotyped ideas of Assyria as a prototypical example of "Oriental despotism," and it had prevented people from understanding the actual realities of how Assyrian deportation worked. Of course this doesn't mean that being deported by the Assyrians was not a violent and brutal event, but if you end your analysis there, you will miss out on the complexities of the situation -- and that is what Radner has spent her career arguing. Most other scholars don't go along with her ideas about the term "deportation" being too reductive, but pretty much everyone is in agreement that Assyrian deportation policy is much more complicated and nuanced than past generation of scholars who uncritically accepted the Biblical narrative thought it was.
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Feb 28, 2024 05:14
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Ithle01 posted:I haven't really had this experience with reading contemporary history and, honestly, I think that most contemporary history is significantly better than that written in the past, but that's just what I've been reading. If you read about any group of humans you will inevitably get to some messed up stuff. The Assyrians might be a bit worse than some, but they're not that exceptional. Then again I haven't read this book so for all I know the author really did try to whitewash this. Overall, how was it though? Because I'm looking for some stuff to read this Summer. Fair enough. I've only gone through half of it, so I'll have to report back on the end of it, but so far, the most interesting parts are the two "case studies" he does, one about the death of Sargon II, whose body went missing in battle and so went unburied, and another one about the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC. Those were both really entertaining. The material before that was a bit difficult for me to get through, because I don't have many reference points for Assyria, and he makes it sound like the record isn't as full until you get to Tiglath-Pileser III. The last chapter of the book is dedicated to the destruction of Assyrian artifacts by ISIS in the 2010s, which I'm really looking forward to. But then again, being entertained probably isn't the main reason to read historical surveys. I can't complain about any of the info, but I wouldn't know any better. There are only hazy descriptions of what Assyrian warfare actually looked like, would be one thing I felt was missing – there's a brief description of types of troops, but no real "military history," which I thought was weird since the content is so "military." You get a lot of references to siege works and campaigning without an explanation of what that really looks like. Nerdburger_Jansen fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 06:07
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CrypticFox posted:The stuff with trying to argue against the severity of Assyrian atrocities comes in large part from people writing in response to the traditionally dominant narrative of Assyria that is based on Biblical sources, which present Assyria as the greatest evil the world has ever seen, and trying to contextualize the Biblical account with a more balanced picture that makes heavy use of the documents from the Assyrians themselves. This effort can certainly go to far, but it doesn't serve any useful purpose if we just read the Biblical account of Assyria as the greatest evil to ever exist at face value without trying to critically assess these ideas based on all the other available evidence (as past generations of scholars often did). A lot of the most aggressive "whitewashing" of Assyrian atrocities comes out of the work of Karen Radner, and checking my copy of the book, she is the person who Frahm cites in the footnote on page 148 were he talks about other scholars who have argued for the use of the term "resettlement" rather than "deportation." That's something proposed by Radner that has not achieved much support from others, including Frahm himself (in the following line Frahm says "this view might be overly generous"). And even Radner certainly acknowledges the brutal nature of Assyrian deportations, despite wanting to reframe how they are understood by scholars today. Thank you for the explanation! You even found the main passage I was alluding to.
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Feb 28, 2024 06:09
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This reminds me of the debate over Julius Caesar, which tries to contextualize his real actions against his enduring reputation as a military genius or heroic conqueror by pointing out that his actions in Gaul likely amounted to genocide of multiple Gallic tribes but also that such acts wouldn't have been outside the norm of ancient warfare. It's a fine line to walk trying to restore nuance and complexity to the history of peoples who already have an unshakeable reputation in popular culture.
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Feb 28, 2024 13:49
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Mr_Roke posted:I finally finished The Burgundians A Vanished Empire and it's such a wonderful book. I appreciate these thoughts. It's always good to hear about history books that are both well written and scholarly. I was on the fence about giving The Burgundians a shot, but I probably will given this endorsement.
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Feb 28, 2024 15:58
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I've finally gotten through the second half of Neil Price's survey of Viking history. The second half has a treatment of the "Viking east," and while he claims the west-east divide is artificial, this is betrayed by the fact that he himself treats them separately in a way that seems to make a lot of sense. The east is also given a more cursory treatment than the west. There are a lot of great cultural anecdotes in this latter part of the book – thoughts on women buried with weapons, church bells thrown into harbors, Chinese silks ending up in the Danelaw, and whatever. But the book never congeals into an actual history – there's no actual temporal account of major events and characters. So at the end of the book I'm still left feeling like I don't have a good outline of the history of Viking Scandinavia, which is not something you want to be saying about a "history." What is it, if not a history? I guess, a series of sociological essays told from the perspective of an archaeologist, seemingly intended for someone who has already read an introductory history. Major people and events are alluded to in passing as if the reader already knows about them, and they're never explained. Overall, I learned a lot, but not what I actually wanted to learn, and I ended up thinking the structure and content of the book was very strange. It's not a bad book, but I think it's labeled wrong.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:31
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Well I haven't read it, so I'm going out on something of a limb here, but it sounds like you're running into the difference between traditional narrative history ("here are the events that happened, in order", like it's a story) vs modern history which is often focused on trends or processes, because it does assume you know the basic outline, or can go reference a well known person/event in some other work (wikipedia). That said I'm surprised that what looks like a mass-market work didn't include that outline. And the East/West division is extremely artificial, there's loads of crossover happening. The issue for us moderns though is that the Eastern sources are far more sparse. Vikings are clearly hugely important to what's going on in modern Ukraine/Belarus/Russia, but almost no written accounts survive.
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Mar 5, 2024 21:57
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Well I haven't read it, so I'm going out on something of a limb here, but it sounds like you're running into the difference between traditional narrative history ("here are the events that happened, in order", like it's a story) vs modern history which is often focused on trends or processes, because it does assume you know the basic outline, or can go reference a well known person/event in some other work (wikipedia). I suppose that, even if it's an antiquated view, I expect after reading a history to have the ability to articulate a general outline of major events and polities in a region. This book did not provide that. If a good modern history requires me already to know the outline, then I have to ask – where does the buck stop? I have to, at some point, actually be told who Harald Finehair and Harald Bluetooth are. This was a history of the Vikings which, shockingly, did not do that. Edit: I meant Harald Fairhair. See, the book didn't even teach me the name right...
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Mar 5, 2024 22:30
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Yeah that’s just non-intro history texts. Most monographs focusing on a specific more niche subject are going to assume you know the basics.
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Mar 5, 2024 22:35
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Yeah that's just how it goes sometimes. I remember reading Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West for fun back in my early 20s, and having to take notes because I couldn't keep track of all the people who were otherwise unfamiliar to me. On the other hand that's a text clearly aimed at academic readers who are going to know that stuff already (or do what I did and just look them up when they didn't know), which is fine honestly, because having to reproduce the basic narrative in every text would be a bit of a waste of time, especially for academic readers. That said Children seems to be targeting a very different audience so  e: Based on the description though it sounds like he's trying to fight back against misconceptions present in the typical western popular narrative, he might have just assumed anyone interested in reading it would be familiar with said narrative. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 00:04
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:I suppose that, even if it's an antiquated view, I expect after reading a history to have the ability to articulate a general outline of major events and polities in a region. This book did not provide that. If a good modern history requires me already to know the outline, then I have to ask – where does the buck stop? I have to, at some point, actually be told who Harald Finehair and Harald Bluetooth are. This was a history of the Vikings which, shockingly, did not do that. Roughly speaking, you were looking for a narrative, political history. Or maybe a wikipedia timeline with a list of people. Children seems much more useful in getting you a sense of the people though.
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Mar 6, 2024 00:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah that’s just non-intro history texts. Most monographs focusing on a specific more niche subject are going to assume you know the basics.
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Mar 6, 2024 00:44
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:I suppose that, even if it's an antiquated view, I expect after reading a history to have the ability to articulate a general outline of major events and polities in a region. This book did not provide that. If a good modern history requires me already to know the outline, then I have to ask – where does the buck stop? I have to, at some point, actually be told who Harald Finehair and Harald Bluetooth are. This was a history of the Vikings which, shockingly, did not do that. Both Fairhair and Fine hair are slightly inaccurate but still commonly used forms, leaving the impression that his hair might have been unusually thin or light coloured. The most accurate would be something like Lovely-Locks or Good hair, but those haven't caught on.
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Mar 11, 2024 02:34
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Bilirubin posted:Reminds me to finally read The Plantagenets this year I read it last year. It’s good! The follow up on the War of the Roses: also good! Really makes you understand why ASOIAF is so loving bloody.
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Mar 15, 2024 00:18
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Does anyone know if there’s a more contemporary version of Edward Gibbons “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”? I’m interested in that period of history but it’s hard to find books about. Everything is about the Romans, or the Byzantines or starts later. I have tried to read Decline and Fall, but remember it feeling quite dated.
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Mar 15, 2024 00:25
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Modern, better books tend to be more specialized. I'd recommend all of these: The Inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham. The Fate of Rome, Kyle Harper. The New Roman Empire, Anthony Kaldellis (I have not read this yet but all his other stuff is good so I am pretty confident here) Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood, Anthony Kaldellis. Alaric the Goth, Douglas Boin. I would probably start with The New Roman Empire, it's a narrative overview from Constantine to the end.
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Mar 15, 2024 01:08
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Grand Fromage posted:Modern, better books tend to be more specialized. I'd recommend all of these: Awesome, thank you 
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Mar 15, 2024 02:09
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I just started the New Roman Empire and while it is good it is also very heavily focused on the Eastern Roman Empire (i.e. the Byzantine) and it is also super focused on Christianity and the origin of the Catholic church. Granted I'm not far in, only about 150 pages, but it's basically "hey here's how the Catholic church was shaped by the Romans". The author also hyped up Julian the Apostate a bit, which I feel is going weird places because Julian should probably be, at most, about one or two pages.
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Mar 15, 2024 02:10
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Ithle01 posted:I just started the New Roman Empire and while it is good it is also very heavily focused on the Eastern Roman Empire (i.e. the Byzantine) and it is also super focused on Christianity and the origin of the Catholic church. Granted I'm not far in, only about 150 pages, but it's basically "hey here's how the Catholic church was shaped by the Romans". i read it recently, it's well written but it's far more a history of christianity in the eastern empire than a history of the empire itself. entire wars are given paragraphs at most but every minor conclave is give multiple pages or more.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:27
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I've learned from Michael O'Brien that the intensive rioting against James Meredith in Mississippi radicalized JFK on the history of Reconstruction, leading to him meeting David H Donald and asking him about the Republican radicals. (paraphrase) "If they can lie like that about what we and the marshals did yesterday, they must have been lying about what happened a hundred years ago."
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Mar 15, 2024 05:20
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I've always wondered about that conversion. To me it smells of political expediency, but maybe it's just the intellectual lobotomization that we all perform from time to time to not seem like lunatics. I know that there was a long lineage of progressive historiography both in academia (charles beard) or in pop history (matthew josephson's the politico's) in the early 20th century that underplayed the positive role of reconstruction and in order to hold the democratic coalition there needed to be some historical amnesia, but the civil rights strain was already a strong part of the Northern democrats well before his conversion. Even the publication of profiles in courage, in 1955, which profiles Andrew Johnson, seems late, particularly since he had Harvard prof Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contributing heavily to the book, IIRC. From an intellectual point of view, black reconstruction came out in 1935 and there were other works with more positive views of reconstruction from that time period as well, even if the revisionism in mainstream academia didn't really take hold until the 60s. I tend to be more sympathetic to Bobby Kennedy's intellectual conversions. plogo fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 16:48
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Multi volume history of India? Something accessible to an amateur; I'm reading for leisure, not study. But something will sufficient detail; 5k years of the subcontinental history is impossible to cover in a single volume.
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Mar 17, 2024 22:06
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is there is good interesting biography on bismarck, i have always found him interesting
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Mar 18, 2024 13:57
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Bagheera posted:Multi volume history of India? Something accessible to an amateur; I'm reading for leisure, not study. But something will sufficient detail; 5k years of the subcontinental history is impossible to cover in a single volume. I've enjoyed these: Richard Eaton - India in the Persianate Age (1000 - 1765) Ramachandra Guha - India After Gandhi
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Mar 18, 2024 15:06
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Dapper_Swindler posted:is there is good interesting biography on bismarck, i have always found him interesting The AJP Taylor biography is very readable. It came out in 1955, so I'm sure more modern biographies have some important correctives, but I doubt that any are as engaging. plogo fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 18:42
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This is kind of a weird one Can anyone recommend me the most unbiased biography of Lee Atwater? I suddenly got the urge to really learn more about him.
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Mar 20, 2024 03:32
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Can anyone suggest a history of the First International? Preferably something that isn’t exclusively from the Marxist perspective, but I’m pretty in the dark about the topic so I’ll take what I can get.
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Mar 20, 2024 19:51
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Jeremor posted:This is kind of a weird one probably not a bio per say but the pearlstein books like nixonland and others are very good about covering all of that stuff.
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Mar 20, 2024 20:39
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chrmnbill posted:Can anyone suggest a history of the First International? Preferably something that isn’t exclusively from the Marxist perspective, but I’m pretty in the dark about the topic so I’ll take what I can get. I've heard good things about The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men's Association by Wolfgang Eckhardt. It is sympathetic to Bakunin. I haven't read it myself. The section on the first international in Richard Evan's The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 was informative for me. This short essay by Karl Korsch is interesting, history wars within marxism over the first international, and he also highlights the importance of the american civil war as a catalyst for the formation of the international. https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1924/first-international.htm plogo fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 20:47
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Can anyone recommend a good book on the Empire of Japan, with a focus on Japanese expansionism in the lead up to and during the pacific war? Preferably not too focused on the military aspect so much as the politics and international consequences.
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Mar 22, 2024 04:20
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zedar posted:Can anyone recommend a good book on the Empire of Japan, with a focus on Japanese expansionism in the lead up to and during the pacific war? Preferably not too focused on the military aspect so much as the politics and international consequences. I've been reading Japan 1941 by Eri Hotta. It covers the political situation that led to war with the US. I'm not qualified to say how accurate it is, but it's a good read
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Mar 22, 2024 04:58
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I also second Japan 1941 by Eri Hotta as that is a diplomacy/high politics look at the years preceding the Pacific War. Additionally, if you want more of a focus on the economics behind of the Empire of Japan, I would recommend Japan prepares for total war: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941, by Barnhart, about how Japan's search for economic security and resources led to imperial conquests.
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Mar 22, 2024 15:05
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Hirohito and the making of modern Japan was good, although I'm no expert.
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Mar 28, 2024 02:31
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Sorry I guess i wasn't specific enough. I guess I'm looking for a bigger picture than just the Pacific War, which I feel like is covered pretty well in a lot of places. I'm more interest in the period covering the First Sino-Japanese War right up until the Pacific War.
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Mar 28, 2024 04:43
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