I just stumbled on a neat site last night. The Air Force Historical Research Agency has thousands of pages of declassified documents available, most of them produced internally by the Army Air Force and United States Air Force.

Perhaps /u/The_Alaskan would like to know what the AAF thought of Alaskan air defense and the Japanese invasion of his state. Well, here's part one, and here's part two--both from 1944. Maybe you'd like a contemporary look at bombsight maintenance training. What about the AAF down under in the early years of WWII? They have you covered. Or perhaps you'd like to read 150 pages on how aircrew trainees were procured.

I found all manner of distracting documents there, which is why the reviews of Soldiers and The Spanish Holocaust are incomplete and not occupying this space.

If you'll excuse me, i'm going to go back to wasting time reading about the plans for the use of the Luftwaffe during Operation Sea Lion.

I read this interesting article on the “peasant revolt” generally dated to 996. Handbooks on the (post-)Carolingian world rarely fail to give it a passing mention, but it is generally analysed in the light of the paradigm of the “feudal revolution,” as a first example of resistance of a free peasantry whose status is becoming unstable (other explanations included the continuity of Norse traditions of deliberation). Though the paradigm is now mostly dead and gone, its former influence is still clear in the lingering of some of its themes (e.g the Peace of God as a grassroot movement). This article shows quite convincingly that the reliable account of the “revolt” does not refer to any anti-feudal violence/subversion, but rather to a sworn association, reminiscent of the communal movement rather than a jacquerie. Even more interestingly, it underlines how this movement can be linked with the Carolingian fear of coniurationes, i.e. basically non-sanctioned placita, and especially with the famous example of the anti-Viking militia of 859. Associated with other findings of recent research (i.e. the case of Italy, as analysed by Wickham, that clearly shows the strong association of the communal movement with former Carolingian lands) I think that there is definitely room for a reevaluation of the communal movement as a post-Carolingian institution, inspired not by reaction against anarchy, but rather as a reappropriation of Carolingian practices (a line that has been pursued very fruitfully with the Peace of God).

I recently ordered The Early Chinese Empires by Mark Edward Lewis. This is more of a test run to see how I do with self-research. I'm not a historian but I am a soon to be geologist so I figure if I can handle reading geology related research papers then I can read history related research papers. With that said, I have no idea how different getting stuff to read for historians is. For my line of research, I could grab rocks from the same outcrop and gather data from the same sources if I wanted to. Anyways, from what I've read from here, the book I ordered is a bit more toned down so I wonder if anybody here can recommend a bit more dense book for me to see if I can deal with it?

Topics can be China or something related to how people deal with their environment.

Started reading Civil War Command And Strategy: The Process Of Victory And Defeat by Archer Jones. It's been sitting on my bookshelf for a while now and I've always been somewhat ignorant to the way in which Civil War armies conducted their operations. Jones is also one of the co-authors to Why the South Lost the Civil War, a book I've never been a fan of, but Command And Strategy seems to be what I was looking for.