Today:
Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.
So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!
I have in my hands a copy of Elizabeth van Heyningen's new The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History launched in July, six months before I expected it, and it's amazing. Besides being the first attempt to treat the camps of the South African War (1899-1902), and discourse around them, systematically in almost sixty years, it's done with tremendous nuance and sensitivity to the way we do social and cultural history now. Besides, a lot of the research material she draws from is completely new and it's the result of about 12 years of archival work on three continents. It's an amazing piece of scholarship and will change the way I run my seminar on the war; I'm even dreaming of getting her to Skype in and talk with my students next year. It's not an expensive book ($25 on Amazon) and if you have any interest in SA history, or the camps, I'd strongly recommend it. It's a reminder that some of the 19th-century folks are still hard at work in South Africa!
I'm looking for the best book on the Russian Civil War. I'm not really interested in the military side (tactics, descriptions of battles), but rather the politics and ideas that were being developed at the time (what were the sides thinking, reasons behind the foreign invasion, the role of the Cheka, the place of the peasants, power struggles within the reds, the economy, etc), alongside an outline of what was happening militarily across the country.
For some reason those few years are a bit of a black hole in my knowledge.
Still looking for a good book on how the muslims first arrived into Iberia, and how Cordoba was founded. Also, I am interested on a good book that depicts the Huns, their conquest and impact on the world.
Looking for: Very in depth Social/Political/Economic history of the impact of a pandemic such as the plague.
History of any era of Iran excluding the great game period and anything thereafter.
I'm looking for copies of geologic maps of Germany, the earlier the better. I'm doing a project on the historical development of petroleum resources.
Can anyone point me to a good recent review paper about the modelling of historic events? I'm particularly interested in what has been done with multi-agent approaches. I'm not looking for any particular time period or location, I'm mostly interested in the techniques. Anything from meso-american farmer populations to WWII suppy lines will be fine.