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MathMathCalculation posted:On a related note, what can be recommended about Native American history BEFORE the Europeans came over? Or at least up until 1800 or so? These are two very niche aspects of Native American history, but might still be of interest: Fossil Legends of the First Americans by Adrienne Mayor, which explores how Native Americans interpreted fossils they found and the idea of extinct life, as well as helping to shape how later settlers began fossil hunting in the 1800s In Search of First Contact by Annette Kolodny, which is about how the Norse sagas about Viking exploration of Canada shaped the American public in the 1800s, but includes a substantial section where she records Native American oral histories on their encounters with the Vikings and how the Natives interpreted them
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Jun 19, 2020 16:01
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PawParole posted:any good books on early human agriculture/ late Paleolithic life? The first section of "Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food" covers this. Whole book is worth reading even if the rest isn't about the Paleolithic.
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Jun 23, 2020 14:05
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bowser posted:Also I asked earlier but didn't get any responses, any good books on the history of the Indian film industry? One that comes to mind, although it's only on an aspect of the Indian film industry, is "Fashioning Bollywood: The Making and Meaning of Hindi Film Costume"
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Jun 23, 2020 17:11
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Grevling posted:Does anyone know any good books on human settlement in the arctic? If it's about Inuit specifically that's alright but I'm also fascinated by the "paleo-Eskimo" who were there before them. It blew my mind when I found out people were living on Greenland over three thousand years ago. Brian M. Fagan's 1987 "The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America" is probably the closest thing I've personally read that would cover paleo-Eskimos. Vilhjálmur Stefánsson's 1913 "My Life with the Eskimo" is an influential early anthropological study of the Eskimo and their history from his time living with them. To a lesser extent also his 1938 "Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic" Helge Ingstad's 1966 "Land under the Pole Star" is about the Norse settlement of Greenland but has a lot about the Inuit and their interactions with the Norse.
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Jun 25, 2020 15:29
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Zhukov wrote his own autobiography in the 60s, but I think only edited versions are available in English. Even in Russian I don't think the full unedited version was available until the early 00s. From what little I know about it, the full version at least was held up as fairly accurate. I've only ever read the initial American publication from the late 60s, though. But even that seemed generally decent for a WWII book written by a ranking Soviet general in the Brezhnev freeze.
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Jun 29, 2020 17:40
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Cheesasaurus posted:Looking into reading Eric Hobsbawm’s books soon. If anyone can speak to them, I’d appreciate it. I've read his "The Age of XXX" books, plus Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 and The Invention of Tradition, which he co-edited with TO Ranger (who's one of the best historians of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, if that interests anyone). All of those are definitely worth reading. Though the Age Of books are obviously more of a general overview and the latter two are more specific in their focus.
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Jul 11, 2020 04:03
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Is there a good book about the evolution of whaling? Like Mark Kurlansky or Bill Bryson does whales? I don’t need (or want) something super academic. May not be 100% what you're looking for but Nancy Shoemaker's Native American Whalemen and the World is a good way of looking at both 19th century Native American and whaling history. It's definitely not super dense.
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Jul 22, 2020 19:18
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Shibby0709 posted:I took a class taught by HW Brands while a student at the University of Texas and we had to read a few of his books during the semester. That seems a bit shady, basically forcing a large number of students to buy your book. I know at least at the state university I went to, it was explicitly forbidden for that reason, though professors could assign articles or scanned chapters or anything else they'd written that could be accessed freely. Actually along that topic, when I was in grad school a professor sent the class what was basically the PDF of his upcoming book manuscript and asked us for any feedback. So that was essentially getting twenty grad students to proof it. That being said it was actually pretty good so I didn't really mind. If anyone's interested, this is the book, and I would recommend it if WW2-era diplomacy is your thing: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691157924/roosevelts-lost-alliances
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Jul 23, 2020 00:28
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Origami Dali posted:the history of the cultural concept of Witches/Witchcraft. They may not 100% be what you're looking for, but some good recommendations in that general theme in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jaivirdi/status/1290393952483454980
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Aug 5, 2020 19:59
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Pick posted:Any easy reading about Canaanites or Phoenicians? Something accurate but not too dense? In Search of the Phoenicians by Josephine Quinn is a good recent book that's scholarly while also being readable.
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Aug 7, 2020 13:45
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Strange Cares posted:What's a good book about the Enlightenment in Europe? If you're still looking, I just came across a pretty comprehensive Enlightenment reading list: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/modules/hi153/timetable/wk2/
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Aug 9, 2020 15:37
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SubG posted:Is there a better reference on the filibustering insurrections in the 1850s than The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire? It's not quite entirely on filibustering, but Matt Karp's This Vast Southern Empire is a more recent work on how slaveowners ran American foreign policy from the 1840s to the civil war. Not sure how his approach works in concert with the earlier book, though.
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Aug 10, 2020 16:25
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StrixNebulosa posted:The Making of the English Working Class Absolutely. Plus there's a podcast, Casualties of History, which is covering it chapter by chapter so you can have a companion to slogging through it.
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Aug 27, 2020 15:10
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NUMBER 1 FULCI FAN posted:What about the seven years war? I want to read more about Frederick II's military career, most things I read about him are more about his statesman/philosopher side. It's not entirely about him, and the book is something like 50 years old now so I'm sure there's more recent work which might revise some of it, but The Politics of the Prussian Army by Gordon A. Craig is a very in-depth look at how the Prussian military was central to Prussian politics and statecraft. I read it about a decade ago and remember it being very good.
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Sep 20, 2020 18:27
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Any recommendations for a good book on Europe spanning the first half of the 20th century? Could end at 1939, 45, even 56 or 68. But something that looks at that early chunk of the European century as a bloc of time on its own?
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Oct 5, 2020 18:03
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FMguru posted:Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–1949 Awesome. Many thanks.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:22
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PawParole posted:give me a book about the occupation of Japan or Germany. Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Buruma
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Oct 10, 2020 20:29
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I'm going to be a bit selfless and promote my own work here - the embargo on my doctoral dissertation ended today, so while it's not a book per se, if anyone's interested in what amounts to a free ebook on settler colonialism, political appropriation of history, the use of legends, and how colonial ideologies ties into modern US politics, enjoy! https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/2342/
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Nov 3, 2020 15:49
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Pick posted:Send that to Seven Hundred Bees, our next D&D book blind round robin is on that exact topic. Is there some thread for that?
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Nov 3, 2020 21:23
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Boatswain posted:Well congrats, and good luck with your job search! Thank you! Although job search... haha. This is actually the third year I'm on the job market, and the second post-PhD. Last year was worse than the year before. This year is apocalyptic. I'm lucky to have five adjuncting spots now. It looks like that's going to go down to two in the spring, unless something comes out of the blue. But honestly, the likelihood of getting a tenure track position, or even a fellowship, is essentially zero. I'm trying to think about the times that counterfactuals came up in graduate classes. The closest I can think of is the book "Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory" by Malcolm Smith, whose first chapter is on how people in interwar Britain imagined what a second World War would be like. In that class, we also briefly talked about how impossible it is to seriously address the typical questions like "what if the Germans invaded Britain in 1940?" We also watched the mockumentary CSA in a class on depictions of slavery in film (a class which was actually taught by an historian who's also a speculative fiction author, P. Djèlí Clark). Although I was done with coursework by the time it came out, I did read Catherine Gallagher's "Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction" and would recommend it!
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Nov 5, 2020 18:57
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Strange Cares posted:Are there any good biographies of Mansa Musa? I haven't come across any monograph on Mansa Musa and I suspect there may not be any just because not enough specifically about him may not exist (for example, a cursory Google seems to show books with him in the title as also including histories of Timbuktu), but I can suggest a few works on general Muslim West Africa of his life if that would fit the bill. I know there are a few articles that have been written on the economic effect of his fabled pilgrimage and whether he actually did cause a depression in the Mediterranean or not.
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Dec 30, 2020 02:04
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Sorry to double-post, but does anyone have any suggestions for a book on Guatemalan history that would appeal to a general audience?
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Dec 31, 2020 00:54
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Shiela Fitzpatrick's "Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s" is a good look on what regular Soviets' lives were like under Stalin.
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Jan 4, 2021 01:31
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stealie72 posted:I fear I am asking for an impossible thing here, but: It's not quite the time period you specified but general books I assign for my Modern Africa course are Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore's "Africa since 1800" and Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood's "Pan-African History: Political figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787" Dapper_Swindler posted:i dont know the title of the book but it was about how loving dumb and broken the confederate government was in the civil war and how most of them were weird liberterians and one like duled a bunch of people over petty poo poo. any ideas? Are you thinking of "Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South"?
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Jan 30, 2021 19:12
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stealie72 posted:Thanks to both of you. Its somewhere for me to start. Completely forgot this, but another you should check out: "The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages" by François-Xavier Fauvelle. Again, a very general overview of the continent over a wide span of time, but I thought it was very well done. Also, David Northrup's "Seven Myths of Africa in World History" and "Africa's Discovery of Europe: 1450-1850" I would also give high marks to. The second is probably closer to what you're looking for, but the first is also useful for answering general questions about how Africa is depicted in popular culture.
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Jan 31, 2021 20:07
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I read "The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany" by Jonathan Zatlin in grad school and found it to be really interesting.
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Feb 3, 2021 05:22
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PawParole posted:give me a book about the French Revolution that isn’t written by Whigs or Conservatives. Just a few days ago there was a new (though abriged) English translation of Jean Jaurès' A Socialist History of the French Revolution. The original work is from the first few years of the 1900s and was one of (maybe the?) first Marxist historical works on the Revolution as a whole. I'm sure it's dated now but it's an important work on its own.
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Feb 4, 2021 22:53
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Bilirubin posted:This is still quite controversial and is is far from scientific consensus From my memory also, the people who proposed that the cuts were caused by humans later retracted their claim. Didn't it end up being the fact that there was highway construction going on literally overhead that caused the mammoth bone damage?
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Apr 15, 2021 17:11
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This book on human migration to the Americas is coming out next year, but knowing the author, I'm sure it will be good and worth keeping an eye out for: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/jennifer-raff/origin/9781538749715/
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Apr 20, 2021 20:54
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Karenina posted:Good books on the history of prostitution/sex work in the US or France? Ideally focusing on the 19th century onward, if that helps narrow it down. It's a subject I'd like to learn more about, but I don't know where to start. Sounds like you'd like "Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris" by Jill Harsin. Came out in the last few years so pretty recent scholarship. Edit: Vasukhani posted:What is perhaps understated is how much Hitler looked to the United States as a German future, not just in the obvious living space = manifest destiny way, but also in his envy of American consumer culture. James Whitman's "Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law" also from a few years ago looks how much the US legal system influenced Nazi jurisprudence. Chairman Capone fucked around with this message at 02:22 on May 12, 2021 |
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May 12, 2021 02:19
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Being a cowboy was a hard and lovely job, so surprise, a disproportionately high number of them were black. Not that they haven’t been erased in pretty much all media appearing afterwards. There's also a large history of cowboy strikes and other organized attempts to exert pressure on the ranch owners that's been largely forgotten in popular consciousness. 15-20 years ago there was a big wave of historical reality shows that were inspired by BBC productions like 1900s House and Coal House, and one of them was a PBS show called Texas Ranch House that was essentially people trying to run a mid-1800s cowboy ranch for three months solely using period technology. That was one of the most interesting "___ House" shows because the labor (and racial) issues actually did emerge in the show, both between the ranchers and the owner family, as well as racially among the cowboys and cooks, and then between the women and the men of the owner family. No idea where it's available to watch now, but I'd recommend it if you can find it. Randy Quaid is even the narrator!
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May 12, 2021 18:10
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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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Ben Nerevarine posted:First a rec: Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. I'm sure it's been discussed in this thread before, but it's horrific, the numbers beyond understanding, and an extremely well researched and captivating read. Bloodlands makes some interesting arguments but I think it's colored by Snyder's undeniable dislike of Russia combined with his love of Poland. Whether imperial Russia (The Reconstruction of Nations), the USSR (Bloodlands), and post-Soviet (all of his books and public talks in the last decade) he just does not like Russia and that occasionally leads him to some odd conclusions, like saying that Stalin was actually the person responsible for WWII or that defeating Hitler would have been impossible without the Polish resistance. I'm not saying that all of Bloodlands is bad, like I said the book makes some good arguments, but there are definitely some points where Snyder's personal views come through. I think there's a reason in the last few years that he emerged as the leading scholar obsessed with Putin being Hitler 2.0 and Trump as Putin Stooge, because a lot of that was already there in his work. I think it's also why The Reconstruction of Nations is his best work, he mainly wrote it before Putin came to power (and I think focuses on an area of history that's had less attention pointed on it so stands out as something new in the historiography rather than another book on twentieth century Europe).
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May 24, 2021 01:50
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I think the general linkage comes from Snyder's view (which is not just in Bloodlands) that Poland was the most important country of Europe in the twentieth century and that the recreation of Poland in 1918 was the most significant event of twentieth century Europe, and that both the Nazis and Soviets came to power (at least according to him) specifically due to the destruction of Poland being not only a major political agenda but as a specific factor that caused the development of Nazism and Bolshevism as ideologies, and the Molotiv-Ribbentrop Pact as the convergence of their mutual hatred of Poland specifically. I forget if it's also in Bloodlands but in Reconstruction of Nations where he specifically says that without the Polish-Soviet War there would not be the USSR, but also Poland was the country which specifically destroyed the USSR through its late 80s/early 90s foreign policy. It also leads him to some questionable conclusions like saying anti-Semitism in 20th century Poland was entirely due to the USSR. Like I said, when you read his books with the notion that he not only absolutely loves Poland and hates Russia, but sees the former as the beacon of all good things in modern Europe and the latter as the source of all bad things, his arguments make a bit more sense.
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May 24, 2021 18:04
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Chiming in to agree with the Hobsbawm, Bayly, and Evans recommendations. Amazon just released a short miniseries about the two conspiracy theorists from Borat 2 and Evans shows up in it as one of their experts, by the way.
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May 26, 2021 15:02
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He doesn't have a book on it (yet) but Ali A Olomi is an historian who has a lot of writing on angels, djinn, and other religious/esoteric elements in Islam that you might want to check out. Edit: Some of the topics are also covered in Sharae Deckard's "Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden" For an article, Scott T. Carroll, “Solomonic Legend: The Muslims and the Great Zimbabwe,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1988), 233-47 Chairman Capone fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jun 2, 2021 |
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Jun 2, 2021 16:56
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TheMightyBoops posted:This is a much better start than what I found on my first search last night. Thanks. No problem! If you have access to JSTOR or ILL, I can recommend a few other articles along those lines that might be useful for you.
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Jun 2, 2021 23:44
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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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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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Thirding Jakarta Method and seconding the Stephen Kinzer books.
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Sep 16, 2021 20:44
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