Does anyone know of a good study on the ethno-religious merchant communities of the Early Modern period from the perspective of New Institutional Economics? I'm thinking of the Baghdad Jews, Isfahan Armenians, Chinese in SE Asia, groups like that. I suppose it doesn't have to be explicitly NIE, so long as it focuses on the way they used their group identities to maintain trade networks.

I have been reading Kathy Peiss' Hope in a Jar. Her research has been very inspirational for me. I was beginning a project on the single woman immigrant, but I might move over to body image through a digital lens.

On another note has anyone read anything by Frederick Jackson Turner? Thoughts? I find his work to be interesting as it is the basis of the modern historiography but I am struggling.

Couple of quickie reviews today:

Library Resource: Accessible Archives: American history primary sources collection

I spent a little time at this vendor’s booth at the ALA Midwinter exhibits hall so I’m kinda rah-rah for these guys right now. There’s a lot of people in the digitized-old-books-and-papers game right now, Hathitrust, archive.org, Gutenberg, but what these people do differently is an emphasis on quality over quantity. They don’t have much yet, but what they do have is flawless in presentation and excruciatingly complete. No sloppy OCR from shitty microform here, you get fully rendered and proofed searchable text and full color images, and very complete runs of things. For instance, they’re the only place you can find a complete run of Godey’s Lady’s Book with all the color plates. Unfortunately not a lot of libraries subscribe yet (even my library doesn’t have their full collection) but I really like what they’re trying to do, so I think they’re a group to keep an eye on.

Books:

• Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Finished this the other day. Very short, like a dissertation length. Lots of nice archival pictures including a shirtless Mark Twain and some very cuddly cowboys! Other than the pictures this book was kinda a bummer, because I LOVE LOVE LOVE books about “homosocial environments,” especially with men, but this book does some serious overreaching with the literary analysis I think. Now, yeah, pardner’d men alone in the woods in the 1800s in aggregate probably did some crazy amounts of gay sex, but I don’t think that means every period depiction of cowboys in Westerny pulp fiction can be analyzed as homoerotic. The author also makes the observation that depictions of male bonds in literature change drastically after the “invention” of homosexuality at the turn of the century, but doesn’t bust out any examples of this, so you’re kinda in the dark. Meeeehhh. C+ I guess.

But… shirtless Mark Twain.

• Susanna, the Captain & the Castrato: Scenes from the Burney Salon, 1779-80

Okay, this is what I think pop history should be when its at its best. This is, at its core, just a narrative version of one season from the journals of Susanna Burney, second daughter of Charles Burney, which were very recently published. This is about the London season she spent with Gasparo Pacchierotti, which is, to me, one of the saddest, sweetest love stories never told. But this little book is just the same content as her journals in digestible, story-like format, with a few fill-in-the-gap suppositions on the part of the author (which she clearly identifies) and some background information. Doesn’t bog you down with citations or anything, just a nice easy narrative retelling of an interesting story.

I know we get kinda frowned at for harping on pop history a lot, but this is definitely not an academic treatment, it's a tiny little paperback with no formal citations you can read in a day, and it's also totally good.

I've picked up a few books published by Constable & Robinson from their 'Brief History of' series. Mostly because they were less than $5 each. Any historians able to tell me if they're a decent place for a non-historian to start? I realize they're not the most detailed examination of the topics, but as an introduction how do they fare?

I spent several annoying hours in the PR- section of the stacks, looking for some good secondary sources on Caribbean literature. I just need a solid overview that's well grounded in some kind of reasonable theory. I feel like I found lots of really old stuff that seemed outdated. And the newer texts seemed amateurish. I hate when I spend hours and hours for what probably will just be a footnote. But I do need this.

So my feeling is that someone, somewhere must have written some kind of analysis of the relationship between a nascent Caribbean literary scene and the rise of African nationalism--I know there was independence-era exchange between Africa and the Caribbean, and I just need to find out how that got reflected or worked out in Caribbean lit. Argh!

Does anybody have book recommendations on China on Post-Boxer imperial china or the Warlord era? The wiki section is distinctly unhelpful, it almost ignores that time period all together.

I recently read The Days of the French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert in less than two days. It's a good book on the Revolution that brings a broad history of the Revolution to a very easy to read format by focusing on a few specific days and the events that led up to them. I am thinking of writing it up as a recommendation for the Book List.

Before that, I finished a book, Bosnia: A Short History by Noel Malcolm. It gives a good history of the region and tries it's best to ensure that everything is explained, the main thesis of the book is that there are not very many problems that are caused by ethnic infighting but rather outside forces creating ethnic ideas that ruin everything.

Both are a good read, they're both about three hundred pages each and you can find them both either at used book stores or on Amazon for ten or so bucks. Good general reads.

I've almost finished "The Pursuit of Glory" by Blanning (after getting it for Christmas when I saw it on the reading list here). He's largely a good writer who makes all the details of 17th and 18th century Europe incredibly interesting, even the aspects of social history I'm not usually interested in. I've learned about fox-tossing and French people recommending anal sex for avoiding pregnancy. My one reservation is that he overuses the phrase "one example must suffice" on a nuclear scale...

I'm presently reading Augustine of Hippo: A Biography by Peter Brown. I'm hoping to finish it tonight. It's a truly wonderful book, bringing Augustine to life, while also tracing his intellectual progression throughout his life. Most interesting to me is Brown's treatment of Augustine's cross-pollination of pagan philosophy with Christian theology to create his own theology. While the biography was originally published in 1967, the 45th Anniversary Edition, which I have, has an epilogue that sketches out advancements in Augustinian scholarship. It should be fascinating to see what things in this biography have changed in the past 45-50 years.

What's the general opinion on Hobsbawm's series on the long 19th century?

Age of Revolution is over 50 years old now, so is it considered dated? Is it substantially influenced by politics, being written by a Marxist historian during the Cold War?

Personally I find it to be very well written and haven't noticed any real issues with it, but I'm curious how proper historians view it.

Just finished reading Hitler's Empire by Mark Mazower.

His main thesis is that the Nazi's specifically looked upon the American and British Empire's as examples to for their blueprint on how they planned to conquer and rule over much of Europe, primarily the East. Mazower does a pretty good job of showing that even though the Nazi's tried to emulate the British and American systems of Empire, they ultimately failed due to not understanding or ignoring the key mechanics that made imperialism the success it was for the British and Americans.

He also goes into great detail of how levels of collaboration varied between each occupied country and to what extent it helped or hindered the Nazi's war aims. I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject area, it was an excellent read.