Have you ever come across a primary source that just makes you want to triumphantly punch the air and shout to the history gods because it's absurdly relevant? I found one of those sources yesterday.

I'm working on a dissertation about how Japonism and the beginnings of homosexual identity interacted in the United Kingdom, and I'm talking a lot about Oscar Wilde, alterity, interior design, orientalism, and all that lot.

Anyway, yesterday I found this baby: ‘Visit of British Men-of-War to Japan’, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 16 October 1855, p. 4. It's not directly relevant to my argument, I guess, but it draws together multiple threads that I had been having trouble with before. For one thing, the newspaper is from Dublin, where Oscar was born, which demonstrates that Dubliners were getting news from Japan at this early date. Second, about that early date: it's Oscar's first birthday. One year to the day after Oscar Wilde was born, a Dublin newspaper published an account from Japan. Further, the newspaper article describes how British sailors 'obtained a slight glimpse of a Japanese interior,' which nicely sets up the idea of Japanese building interiors as objects of particular curiosity in exactly the time and place Wilde was growing up. No wonder he was so fascinated with Japan and with home decoration. Sprinkle in a little queerness, and I've got a dissertation well on its way.

It's not a big thing, but was a pleasant surprise after several dead ends and frustrating struggles with horrible newspaper archive search functions.

[EDIT] I hope this is an okay place to post this; I know it's about a primary source instead of a book that explicitly 'does history.' Please let me know if I should remove it.

So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano?

Well isn't that fortuitous. I was going to post this in last week's thread but missed it, so now seems to be a good time.

American musical history is a bit of a side interest of mine and I recently wrapped up a "Great Courses" lecture series I picked out, titled Great American Music: Broadway Musicals put together by Professor Bill Messenger.It's a pretty quality survey of American musical theater and popular music along those lines, starting from the origins of the cakewalk and going right up into modern Broadway. Along the way, Messenger blends lecturing with playing examples of tunes himself on the piano, as well as having highlighted songs played from either 78 RPM record recordings or from reconstructions. And besides the history of the composers, notable figures, and styles, Messenger goes into some of the music theory, in a simple enough way that you don't have to be a music major or have lots of music theory exposure to follow along. Definitely would recommend.

Oh, and as for that note about Stalin. This isn't mentioned in the lecture series (unless I missed that part) but is something I discovered after it: Stalin was apparently a big fan of the Soviet film-musical Volga-Volga.

I'm re-reading 'The History of Modern Britain', by Andrew Marr. I've had this since 2009 when I was in school, it's a great book. There's a TV series which accompanies the book too.

Though written in a more popular style, I did just finish reading a book on the British blitz. I've wanted to learn more about this subject for a while, and this book offered some great insight and overall picture into the Blitz. It definitely helped me hone my interests more as well.

Any recommendations for books/articles on the bombing of Aberdeen and Glasgow during the Second World War?

Can anyone recommend a book with a decent overview of Greece under Ottoman rule?

Just started a book called Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark. So far it's incredibly well-written and very evocative reading. I've read countless books that deal with dynastic politics and the Holy Roman Empire during the pre-modern and modern period, but it hasn't quite made sense until I read this book. Seriously, if you can't quite get what the Holy Roman Empire was and what it meant for the states of German Europe, read this book. I've only gotten to Frederick William I, but it's some really compelling stuff. Also, it deals heavily with Austro-Prussian relations, so I'm quite happy with that.

My wife bought me a biography anthology on Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg, the book was written in chunks in the 1920 and 1930s. After digging into it both to learn about Lincoln and to study how Lincoln was presented at the time, I encountered a large number of suspicious quotes and statements that seems really out of place. Using Google to track the quotes I generally encountered the ONLY source on line was a digital copy of the book I was reading.

Are there better online sources for primary source searching? (I have found google is less than stellar for most of my academic source searching and fact-checking projects and I strongly suspect a bias but cannot yet quantify it)

I have also run across this with a number of other books I have read and really questioned the source when it wasn't directly sourced.

I keep asking in /r/badhistory, but I'd love any recommendations for any kind of articles that I could read before my JSTOR access runs out for the remainder of the summer.

I just picked up an awesome book about John Cage and and the relationship between midcentury avant-garde music and recorded music. It is Records Ruin the Landscape, by David Grubbs. One of my favorite parts is about a piece John Cage did with Lejaren Hiller did called Program (Knobs) for Listener - the records came with a printout of random numbers corresponding to positions that the listener is supposed to turn their stereo's bass and treble knobs every five seconds. Every record had a different set of random numbers. The idea being that the piece could be spontaneous even though it was a recorded work.

I'm (re)reading a series of essays on the history of ethnomusicology edited by Bruno Nettl, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music. I'm not actually studying ethnomusicology, but I think this may be sort of a standard text. It's really interesting to get a sense of the way early ethnomusicologists were constrained by basic (Eurocentric) ideas about music. Even Bela Bartok was constrained by the prevailing ideas and vocabulary that described music at that time.

/u/tiako recommended an article about Life of Aesop, which uses the book as an example of fiction that can be used to get a sense of the culture surrounding slavery in 4th century Rome. It's not my field, but it was very interesting. Does anyone know of any articles in a similar vein? Cultural history is actually sort of related to what I'm studying anyway...

I came across a book I'm dying to get, School for Cool, which is all about the jazz becoming institutionalized. I wish books weren't so expensive.

Can anyone recommend good literature written during the early/high Middle Ages for western/Central Europe? I'm already looking into Bede, but would like to expand beyond him and Chaucer.

I found two books on early aviation that seem pretty interesting. Farther and Faster by Terry Gwynn-Jones, and a particularly interesting book called Blue Ribbon of the Air by Henry Villard. The second book is over the Gordon Bennett races, which were international speed and performance races held annually before World War 1. Most laymen think of WW1 aircraft as flimsy machines that could fall apart at any moment (which is a reasonable conclusion compared to today's aircraft) however the Bennett and Schneider Trophies both advanced aircraft design and performance significantly before each world war.