I've been ploughing through early Greek hexameter inscriptions, as part of my quest to find all examples of early hexameter poetry. Standard editions of hexameter cover only literary works -- epic, and related genres -- so other types of extant hexameter tend to get ignored: namely inscriptions, and oracles (which I've collected previously). It turns out there's quite a lot of material: nearly 200 214 inscriptions up to 400 BCE. (Not nearly as much oracular material, though that does tend to get ignored by literary scholars too.)

It's immensely frustrating how difficult it's been to collect the inscriptions. Almost all of the material is only available in decent research libraries, and one does not exist near where I live. (The local university claims otherwise, laughably. There's a passable one 6 hours' drive away, but I just don't have the luxury of overnight trips.) This means that individual volumes need to be discovered and interloaned separately, a slow process, especially when the material is spread over so damn many volumes, and especially hair-pulling when it turns out that addenda appear in a separate volume, or spread over numerous fascicles (as in the case of Inscriptiones graecae).

There's one terrible collection, Friedländer's Greek Verse Inscriptions, which has only about 50 of the hexameter ones, and commits the insanity of changing nearly all of them into the Ionic dialect, making the collection useless for linguistic purposes. Then there's a much more comprehensive one, Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca, which suffers from some methodological problems (like excluding inscriptions transmitted via the literary record or other indirect means -- that only cuts out five hexameter inscriptions, though), but its biggest faults are

1. it's absolutely brutal for someone who isn't already an expert on inscriptions and their orthographic quirks;
2. Hansen's copious apparatus and notes are in a decidedly unfriendly telescoped Latin (in an age when increasingly many Hellenists aren't comfortable with that language; I'm not one of them, but I still resent it); and
3. the book doesn't have a metrical index, which you'd think would be both obvious and necessary for something like this.

After books like that, something like Wachter's Non-Attic Greek Vase Inscriptions is a breath of fresh air; but of course that's very specialised and covers only a small fraction of the material.

It's nice to have somewhere to vent. I suppose this is a long shot, but are there any epigraphers out there who'd be willing to point me to any good collections that I've missed? It's strictly hexameter inscriptions I'm looking at (at the moment, anyway). I'm wondering if I'm wasting my time, because sorting through dozens of inscriptions with variations on "So-and-so dedicated this to Poseidon; now you do me a favour in return" is not, in the end, hugely illuminating. (Edit: I lie: a couple of the Poseidon ones are genuinely important. I'm just frustrated!)

Does anyone know of any English-language books about the underground education system in Poland during WWII, or about the Polish University in Exile? I would appreciate any guidance on this.

Perfect thread for a question I've been having. I'm really interested in the history of science and technology (from about 1850 onwards) and while I have read quite a few good books, mainly on things like the Manhattan project, I was looking for other things and hit a problem. A lot of books I've found seem to either not have a good understanding of the science (which is very important in the context) or not have a good understanding of the history and have glaring inaccuracies.

Any people can recommend?

I am currently reading two books both dealing with the same subject. The first is titled Sculpture of Ancient West Mexico: Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima by Michael Kan, Clement Meighan, and H. B. Nicholson (1989). The other is The Shaft Tomb Figures of West Mexico by Hasso Von Winning (1974). Both books discuss at great length the different styles of hollow figurines that come from West Mexico. Unfortunately, most of their examples come from looted locations and any specific location and possible date these come from is lost.

I'm working on my dissertation lit review, a giant draft of which is due on Monday. Basically, I'm looking at secondary sources and social scientific works to write a small social history of Turkey in regards to state and religion, with special emphasis on geographical variation. State and religion is probably the most written about topic there is when it comes to Turkey, but most stuff is political, cultural, and intellectual history, which is to say, it's the view from above, not the view from below. Writing a "view from below" gives me new respect for social historians and emphasizes why I'm a sociologist, not a historian--I'd never have the patience to wade through the archives looking for 1,000 little needles of answers in the haystack of an archives. Especially because people end up having to rely on one kind of source (in the Turkish case, regional newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, and petitions are the sources for social histories I remember encounteriing, only one of which is really in the archives--I've seen no one using court records or probate records or state inspections/reports, except those found in the official journals of the People's Houses, which provide more of a cultural history of Kemalist thought towards the periphery than giving a lot of good data about what the periphery thought of the Kemalist reforms).

It's funny, in Turkey, it seems like there's a lot of histories up to 1950 (when the first democratic elections take place), and relatively few after that point. Instead, what you find is a lot of social science being written about the contemporary era, both by foreigners and by Turks. The most interesting thing, however, is that the most prolific of these Turkish "social scientists" (Kemal Karpat, Şerif Mardin) are both "actually" historians of the late Ottoman Empire! Kemal Karpat, for example, wrote a book called the Gecekondu (Gecekondus are squatter settlements on the periphery of Turkey's major cities) in 1976, and the only way I can describe the strangeness of it is it's as if someone like Gordon Wood (the only famous American historian I can think of) wrote the Urban Villagers.

Does anyone have any suggestions for books about inter working class relations in Europe around 1900?

I am currently reading Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker. It really delves into the "Little Ice Age" and how climate change impacted the entire globe.

Does anyone know any good English-language books on the Polish government-in-exile in London after 1945? I've found a few titles on their experience during WWII, and a couple academic comparisons of governments-in-exile, but nothing (in English) about them after the war.