Today:
Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.
So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!
I'd like to recommend a book I've been reading alongside my archival research into the k.u.k. Armee of Austria-Hungary in World War I. It's titled A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geoffrey Wawro. It just came out about a month or two ago and I find it fantastic. He gives a detailed account of how prepared the Austro-Hungarian military was for war in 1914, and also details the political factors for why they were prepared in such a manner. His book then goes on to detail the Galician and Serbian campaigns of 1914, again not only giving excellent strategic overviews of those campaigns, but also describing the tactics that were employed by the Austrians, Serbs and Russians.
Also, I'm working in the Vienna War Archives right now and I'm having some trouble with the German handwriting, called Deutsche Schrift. It's coming along the more I read, but does anyone have some useful tips or funny stories about old handwriting or archives?
Perhaps someone out here can help me with something.
I am currently teaching World History to 1500 for the first time and this weekend I'm preparing for a lecture on India in which we will hurtle through time and take my students through all of Indian history before the Gupta Empire.
Obtaining information about Indian history and organizing it into a three hour lecture is quite easy (thank you Cambridge Histories!), but I find myself wanting to learn more about the Gupta Empire. I checked Eraly's First Spring out from the library. It has the depth and scope that I'm looking for, but his celebratory tone and the way he positions the period within the trajectory of Indian history seems quite problematic. Does anyone have any recommendations for a more even handed account of the period?
Hey guys. I have a friend who's very liberal in his political ideologies and I thought I'd buy him a book or two based on Gandhi (or any similar historical figure for that matter), could anyone recommend any?
I'm currently reading "Why Nations Fail", you can guess what it's about from the title. It's written by an economist so fairly economics based but it's very interesting to see just why it is that certain countries prosper while others fail miserably.