I'm coming off finals week, so I've scratched out about 60 pages of historiography in the past week and a half.

In one paper, I looked at Loyalists during the American Revolution from an Atlantic perspective. Loyalists are kind of "in" right now, and Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles seems quite good. I need to give it a more thorough reading over break.

There's also been some good work black and Native American loyalists in the South Carolina campaign during the Rev War. Jim Piecuch's Three Peoples, One King tries to give equal footing between those two groups and white Loyalists, which is commendable.

I finally got around to reading some work by Don Higginbotham and John Shy. I'm surprised Shy's A People Numerous and Armed gets quoted so much, since it's just a short collection of essays.

I just finished a "brief" paper about an old Native American artifact collection lying around at my university. It goes back to the 1870s when a retired Civil War general with an interest in antiquities, Gates P. Thruston, was recruited to lead an excavation of a burial ground just south of Nashville, TN. He entrusted his acquisitions, ~1,020 pieces, to the university in 1907, a few years before his death. In the '60s some of the bigger pieces were loaned to the local historical society, but a good portion is now just sitting in a cabinet in our osteology lab. The thing is, neither our history nor antrho/archaeology departments have ever taught a class on North America, so it's a bit of a mess at the moment. It started as a quick look at identifying someone of the Peruvian vessels that made there way into his hands, but it became a lengthy evaluation of Thruston's book as a pioneer of anthropological archaeology and holistic data analysis. The best find though was when finding a few studies from other authors at the time to compare to him. Some of the copies in the library stacks were actually the ones originally owned by Thruston himself. Checking them out to study his work 130 years later, only to find his own signature and notes in the margin was somewhat surreal.

My reading this week provided by San Jose State University:

Kokubokan: Japanese Aircraft Carrier Development, 1922-1945

David Lawrence Hanely Master's Thesis

I have finally found a biography of Napoleon that doesn't paint him as an ogre. Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts has been very fair to Napoleon and doesn't actively look to demean or destroy him. He may have drank a little bit from the Bonapartist kool-aide and is a little harsh on Josephine, but it's better than getting a biography of how Napoleon was morally bankrupt.

One very good thing that makes me recommend this book is how it addresses Napoleonic Historiography, constantly referring to smaller works that were published (sometimes almost immediately) and how they contrast to what occurred.

Hi, everyone! I have a request. I'm interested in German history, but having trouble getting a foothold. I started reading Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark (about the history of Prussia), but because it assumes a certain level of knowledge about the Thirty Years War that I simply don't have, I set it aside in favor of The Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson. But now I'm having trouble with that because it assumes a certain level of knowledge about feudalism, the structure of the Catholic church, and the make-up of the Holy Roman Empire. Obviously, I'm a layman. Are there any easier introductory books you guys might recommend? Sort of an ELI5 version of the Holy Roman Empire, especially?

EDIT: Links to relevant threads in this sub would be great, too.