Hey all! As some of you may or may not have noticed, /u/AC_7 has been hard at work revamping /r/AskHistorian's World War Two booklist. There's still more work to be done, particularly in giving blurbs on why the books are recommended, but I think it's certainly an improvement over how it used to look.

Don't be shy either, we're always looking for new books to add!

While researching for several Jamestown movie reviews I stumbled across a book called The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History by Linwood Custalow and Angela Daniel. Thus far I've only read long-ish excerpts so I cannot vouch for the entirety source, and I hesitate to plug it here based on my limited knowledge, but as an oral history of the Mattaponi the book provides an intriguing perspective into the traditional Jamestown narrative. Custalow is the latest guardian of the Mattaponi sacred oral history, a history that fleshes out the Powhatan perspective on the events surrounding the early history of Jamestown.

If you've read the book I would love to hear your thoughts before I dive in to read in full later this summer.

I want to give a quick recommendation to the book Trading Communities of the Roman World by Taco Terpstra. It is a work using primarily epigraphy and a very nuanced use of comparative evidence to describe the way merchants organized themselves in the Roman world. His conclusions, based on an understanding of essentially community based organization (eg, the merchants from Tyre, the merchants from Tralles) is not necessarily revolutionary, but many of his insights do advance understanding in considerable ways. In particular, his interpretation of Roman law as being something used by the participants rather than imposed is both very interesting and well argued, and I am eager to see responses in future works (there will undoubtedly be many). As a demonstration of many of the promises of New Institutional Economics and a more heavy reliance on social science, this is absolutely recommended for those interested in the topic, with the note that it assumes familiarity with the state of the field.

A more regrettably qualified note is form Romila Thapar's Early India: From Origins to AD 1300, which I feel I should discuss here as I have mentioned it several times recently. I think this is a good demonstration of just how difficult these sorts of ambitious surveys can be, and not for the right reasons. This isn't a fault on Dr. Thapar's history or conclusions, she is an unqualified expert on the topic, but it isn't terribly well organized. Most notably there is a distressing lack of specificity, even to the point of it often being difficult what region of India she is talking about, and she often doesn't really show the bones of her argument, and so the book often seems to lapse into lists of cultural features and changes. There isn't really a comparable work and you will certainly learn from reading it, but it isn't an Indian equivalent of John Fairbank's China: A New History.

Been rereading Fred M. Locke, a Biography

Locke may be one of the most important inventors you never heard of. His work in early porcelain power transmission insulators, and later with boro silicate glass are still felt to this day. He designed or influenced design that helped make the modern electrical grid possible, and drove innovation with glass formulas later bought by Corning and used in their Pyrex line of industrial glassware. Three currently operating companies; two of them international in scope can trace back to his efforts or influence.

It's great that the university library has a copy of a recently published book exploring the history of war crimes trials - [War Crimes, Genocide and Justice](http://books.google.co.nz/books id=aynFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA380&dq=war+crimes+genocide+and+justice&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nlOmU_vtIMi7kQXyo4DoDQ&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA)

It's aneuyrsm-inducing that it only has an electronic copy and forces me to deal with the rage inducing software which it uses to loan e-books. I'm almost pushed to simply buying a Kindle copy so I can actually read the thing without jumping through 50 hoops and being shut out of it after 20 minutes.