|
Grand Fromage posted:Yang Jisheng's work is equally good. But it's not like there's a fundamentally different take or anything. All that stuff happened, it's well documented, plenty of living people remember it. Even the Party eventually admitted it happened during reform and opening in the 80s, though I wouldn't go talking about it today. There's not really a moral position you can arrive at other than disdain for the people who were responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Anything else would be denialism. That it happened, yes, but there is a lot one can find questionable with the book (Felix Wemheuer has a good review essay on the book). Often his accounts of the view and experience of ordinary people relies on exile accounts due to the lack of memoirs, which however have severe limitations which he does not sufficiently account for, furthermore at times his characterisation of the broader conditions of the peasantry (beyond the famine period) are questionable, with his languages of them being in a kind of neo-serfdom not really according to the broader reality of farmers in the PRC and discounts the process of collectivisation having significant initiative from below(cf the essay on the topic in "Eating Bitterness New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine" ). For what's it worth, he actually owns the archival researche he cites from but does not share it with anyone but professional historians. Since people asked for other reads on the topic, Chris Bramall's "In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan Since 1931" is very good and gives a broader view on it with a good command of sources (the title is not great), the "Eating Bitterness" book as well as "Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union" are all excellent in understanding the GLP and its subsequent fallout more.
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2022 19:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:02 |
|
|
Idaholy Roller posted:Looking for a book on Romanian history round WW2 if anyone has a decent recco??? I’m reading the first of Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy and realise I know nothing about Romania. If you just want Romania's history in WW2 "Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania, 1940 -1944" is good. "The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania" is good for a history of fascism in Romania specifically.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2022 20:56
|
|
|
distortion park posted:I've read Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson) and The Discovery of France (Graham Robb), both were very interesting despite the difference in style. Would love any recommendations of readable histories of nations coming into being as nations. "Peasants into Frenchmen" is a very good book about this topic
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2023 10:20
|
|
|
I haven't read Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson, but I'm reading his Age of Roosevelt currently and it's a really good book series even if really slanted. Sucks that it was never finished.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2023 18:04
|
|
|
plogo posted::salute: I agree! We are past due to for a new synthesis of that time period, written in such an engaging manner. True though I’m unsure nowadays multi-volume histories of this kind would see funding from academia unless one has certain prominence. I could be wrong though. Just my observation since I don’t remember any new examples beyond Wallerstein, but maybe it‘s just amount of information to digest ks much higher now (Wallerstein's modern world system series always has ~100 pages bibliography)
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2023 18:29
|
|
|
Ah I did forget about Caro entirely, though he isn't published by academic presses. I haven't read the Kennedy one yet so I can't judge. Something I want to read more some time are revisionist histories of Hoover's era since on the financial side he laid the groundwork with the foundation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2023 19:07
|
|
|
plogo posted:If you are interesting in the late roman empire / early middle ages I would check out Chris Wickham's works such as The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000. Wickham is great, seconded!
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2023 14:16
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I'm currently reading Hitler's Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum, and I'm a) finding it really compelling and b) depressed after reading some amazon reviews that are taking it and using it as pro-Nazi messaging. Can anyone recommend some good sources directly identifying and criticizing its shortcomings? The works which directly criticise Schoenbaum are in German solely, to my knowledge. However, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 is a response in part to various modernization theories with regards to Nazism (Schoenbaum included), so could be what you want for a different narrative.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2023 19:44
|
|
|
Punkin Spunkin posted:
Hannibal Rex posted:Where would you place Götz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries among these and the previous recommendations? After reading Aly I'd read this article: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...C58391637959F28. Gives a good critique of parts of his book, but Aly is still pretty important and helped re-focus research.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2023 17:26
|
|
|
plogo posted:Yeah, there are a lot of good books on the 60s and 70s. Perlstein's books are potted in their own way, necessarily- heck you can read a whole book on the democratic convention of 1968 like the David Faber one, much less an entire book on 1968. Personally, a lot of my favorite history books in recent years have focused on the 70s, which saw much more attention over the past 20 years, like Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive. Rick perlstein has a nice review essay going through a bunch of them https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seventies-show/. oh a new Lichtenstein book, great! he's an amazing historian. will definitively check that out
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2023 16:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:02 |
|
|
Ras Het posted:You can do lots with "all of human history" but you need a very specific angle. Like the Smil book about the total biomass of the Earth during the history of Homo sapiens That book is so cool
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2024 23:22
|
|