Cleaning out the to-review-queue…

• Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang (2013)

All complaining aside, I only got this off the library new books shelf because I thought there might be some eunuchs in it, and there were, so not too bad on what I was looking for. But this book was a sort of epic revisionist dick-riding of Cixi, which I was not totally expecting, nor did I think anyone would ever write. Cixi gets a rough ride in traditional historiography of China, and I’m sure she wasn’t as totally evil as she gets made out to be, but she also wasn’t a dang national hero like Chang seems to want her to be. There is for sure a very interesting story to be told about her life, but it is not in this book. If you would like to watch an author casually handwave away murdering family members as not a big deal and totally reasonable in circumstances, plus some really clumsy writing, you might get a kick out of this book. But otherwise pee pee doo doo, this is a bad book, don’t read it.

Oh, but I do like Cixi for totally having photos airbrushed. Original photograph held by the photographer vs. the one presented to Cixi Dang that’s some serious airbrushin’.

So the world still needs a really good 5-cent cigar, and also a fair English language pop-history treatment of Cixi.

• Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression by Clara Cannucciari and Christopher Cannucciari (2009)

This is the companion book to the popular Youtube show Depression Cooking with Clara which hit the web in May 2007, and was a totally awesome oral history project. Clara passed away last fall (at 98!) and I always meant to get around to reading the book.

This is, other than just a collection of recipes, a really good snapshot of what Chicago Italian-Americans ate during the Great Depression. What you also see most notably (when you look for it) the is the conservation of labor and not just food. Clara's mother had bad arthritis, and when her arthritis got bad enough Clara had to take over cooking dinner, which would be after she got home from a full day of work at the factory. These are not long complicated recipes. So I feel the book really does present a fair story of what a group of people actually ate on the day to day, not just aspirational historical recipes, fancy expensive things that for sure only got cooked once a year, which tend to dominate “historical” cookbooks.

While this might seem like a bit of a Youtube-famous cash-in book right now, I think in a few years this book will come to be recognized as a decent historical resource for the food history of the Great Depression, as well as an interesting piece of historiography in looking at how the Great Depression was framed and used during the Great Recession.

• Album: Farinelli - Porpora Arias, Philippe Jaroussky (dee-lux edition came out in 2013, cheaper edition came out in 2014)

I had the good luck a few months back to catch Jaroussky on his recent American tour with the Vienna Baroque Orchestra so I’ve always meant to get around to reviewing his most recent album, which he was highlighting in the tour. I have linked to the Spotify for those who Spotfiy.

I really love this album, it might be my favorite of Jaroussky’s, which is a tough thing to say because he never really drops a dud! He limited himself to one composer and one performer, which is kinda a smart trick to put together a really coherent album without a lot of work. Sometimes when vocalists try to mix and match from a lot of people with a loose theme, even in the same musical period, the album can sound like an operatic leftovers casserole and not a proper meal. But this album really just has beautiful flow without the feeling anyone had to strain to make it work.

Traditionally Jaroussky prefers highlighting more forgotten castrati and their music in his albums, and he’s a real closet musicologist, does his own historical research, so the stuff he puts together for his albums is usually pretty “academic.” Consider his last album was about the composer Antonio Caldara, who pretty much no one has heard of! This is his first big push into Farinelli territory, which tends to be more popular, but the arias he’s picked are still pretty obscure, keeping his usually “you probably haven’t heard of this” vibe. In interviews he admitted he avoided doing Farinelli music for YEARS, even though much of it really “sits well” for his voice. So I’m pleased he finally broke down and did the King Castrato’s music.

Oh and he is totes amazeballs live, as you’d imagine. Class act, wore a tie and everything. If you can catch him, well worth the price of admission.

Hello! I am the creator and owner of redditanalytics.com. I wanted to take this opportunity to let the contributors of /r/askhistorians know about some powerful tools I am building for the reddit community.

There have been many amazing contributions to this subreddit (along with other subreddits like /r/askscience). I am creating tools that will allow users to search in much more powerful ways than the standard reddit search.

One of the tools I am creating is a search function that actually searches every comment posted to a particular subreddit and then give suggestions for threads that are most relevant to the search term.

For example, if a reader was interested in learning more about Hitler and finding threads relevant to Hitler, they could perform a search using this link:

http://www.redditanalytics.com/findposts.html?q=Hitler&lookback=8640000

What this would do is look at every comment posted to reddit over the past 100 days and show the threads where the term "hitler" appears most in comments. What makes this better than a reddit or google search? Well, a reddit search generally looks for the term in the submission title. But there could be a submission with the title, "look what I found" that refers to a picture of Hitler kissing a baby. With my search, this would come up under a search for hitler because comments in that thread would most definitely reference hitler.

What I'll be doing moving forward is ingesting all comments with scores from /r/askhistorians and creating visual "maps" of data. People will be able to see relationships between "Hitler" and other things like "World War II," "Holocaust," etc.

I also have an API for developers that allows people to search for terms in comments. For instance, let's say you remember a great post in /r/historians but you don't know where to begin to find it. However, you remember the words "Dowager, Cixi and murdering." (That is actually one of the comments in this thread). You could find that comment and the thread it was associated with by using:

http://api.redditanalytics.com/searchRecentComments.php?q=Dowager+Cixi+murdering

What I would like to do is reach out to the community as a whole (including the moderators) and ask everyone for suggestions on how to make a very powerful tool for researchers and others who are interested in finding information on reddit.

I would greatly appreciate your feedback. I have a lot of other useful tools that you may find helpful as well.

Thank you!

Edit: I will be ingesting and making ALL askhistorian comments available for search in the coming week.

After completing my Master's thesis, I was told that I seem to be a big proponent of what one of my professors called "neo-strucuralism." Not finding much on neo-structuralism, I read up on post-structuralism (which I assumed to be the same thing) and definitely saw some commonalities between it and the methodology behind my research and writing. Does anyone happen to know of any articles or, preferably, books concerning post-structuralism or neo-structuralism so that I can strengthen the theoretical part of my research? Thus far, the only book I've read and incorporated into my research is William Sewell, Jr's. The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. In particular, I'm looking for anything that has to do with the relationship between structures and human agency and the relative influence of each. Thanks for any help.

I've been diving back down into the depths of the past as I write my historiography review for my introduction.

Among the various texts I've been re-reading are Pirenne's Mahomet et Charlemagne and a bunch of stuff by Ferdinand Lot.

The style of these older French scholars always amazes me. They are simultaneously so good at expressing interesting ideas and yet so lacking in (visible) rigor. Footnotes, what footnotes?

It is also astonishing to see how drastically historical ideas get re-evaluated decade after decade. Michael McCormick's Origins of the European Economy is so utterly different from Pirenne it is hard to believe they are effectively starting from the same data.

Inspired by a short guest lecture I attended this past week, and since Google Books came across for me for once, I have picked up China's Old Dwellings by Ronald G. Knapp. It's fantastic from the skimming I've done so far, with lots of details on 间 and 院, as well as all the different variations, illustrated with drawings, pictures, and case studies. Would definitely recommend picking it up via google for anyone interested in the subject. I don't know what's up with the amazon physical copy prices, but the low end is about 300 USD I think, and there were "used" listings at 5000 USD. If you have a kidney to spare, feel free to go that route. The google ebook one is about 35 USD, so definitely the way to go.

Does anyone have a good source for comparative military sizes and expenditures in Europe, particularly from 1930-40? I've been chewing on the whole appeasement question, especially as it relates to the nonintervention policy of Britain and France during the Spanish Civil War. Of particular interest is numbers of fighters, tanks, and artillery among the major European combatants of WWII: France, Britain, Russia, Germany, and Italy. If there is somewhere that also covers Poland and Czechoslovakia that would be excellent. I'm trying to get a handle on relative military capability, basically.

Oh, and the reviews of Soldiers and The Spanish Holocaust are still in the works. Illness and other concerns have sidelined me for a couple weeks, so the reviews are delayed yet again.

I am trying to put together a proposal for a lower division-friendly course on African literary arts to be x-listed in Hist & CompLit. While trying to select books, I went looking for some kind of primer on orality, and of course I started with Isidore Okpewho, one of the most famous scholars in that area.

Of course, I found lots of really rather dry articles and books, but then I found a review of Makuchi's The Sacred Door and Other Stories, a book which includes a really nice little preface by Okpewho, explaining orature and orality in exactly the way you'd want for undergrad freshmen and sophomores.

The book is great--it's short enough that I can assign the entire thing as reading for one week, and I can teach it alongside Shakira's appropriation of Zangalewa as a way of talking about art, appropriation, and the circulation of texts. The collection works really well for this, not just because it's Cameroonian, but because it contains stories that clearly share plotlines with texts like Cinderella and other recognizably Disneyfied folk tales. It will be a fun week for talking about the principle of orality and its role in the globalization of narrative.

The proposal is still in rough outline form...I am just trying to gather together a ton of materials to see what I can put together in a sensible way. I have until May 25th, so there is time, but not that much....

Could someone recommend good surveys of United States political history in the 1850s? I've got Allen Nevins' Ordeal of the Union and David Potter's The Impending Crisis, and supplement them with Freehling's Road to Disunion duology, but I'm always on the lookout for more.

I just started reading Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization by Paul Kriwaczek. I'm not far in but it seems to be well-written. Can anyone offer feedback on how accurate it is? Any recommendations for similar books or ones that offer a different viewpoint?