Every year around the New Year I compile on my blog a bibliography of "nuclear history" (broadly defined) published the previous year. Here is the 2014 edition. It's a somewhat tedious exercise of searching through databases, checking the tables of contents of the "usual suspects" journals, and so on, but in the end it helps me find things that I'd missed (who can keep up?), and serves as an opportunity for others to e-mail me things that I otherwise might not have seen. And it can help give one a good, quick overview of the "state of the field," as it is. It took me about 8 hours of work, spread over several days, to compile the initial list.

On of my future hopes is that as history blogs develop further, this sort of thing will be more common: experts curating bibliographies of their little zones of knowledge, so that others in related fields can get a quick overview of what has been done lately. In any case, that utopian day being somewhat off, it is still a useful exercise for me, and is also one of the ways I can easily justify my blog as a "service" to the broader academic community.

I'm reading two fascinating books at the moment. The first is The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor. It's the second in a two-volume series by the authors on the Iraq War, focusing primarily on the Coalition Provisional Authority's misguided attempts to bring stability to Iraq and establish a new Iraqi government. The first book in the series focuses primarily on the American military planning for the war and the subsequent invasion. While still focusing on military matters, Endgame comes across as much more comprehensive because it additionally gives a great deal of insight into the politics of the CPA, the policy debates within the Bush administration, and the in-fighting among Iraqi government officials and civic figures like prominent Sunni and Shia clerics. While I still don't believe there is a single volume or series that has comprehensively addressed all aspects of the Iraq War, Trainor's and Gordon's series is certainly the nearest thing we have to a complete picture of the war and occupation. I highly recommend it to any one interested in the topic.

The other book I'm reading is Daniel Sargent's A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s, which was published last week. I'm still in the book's early sections, but thus far it seems like it will be the new standard for histories of U.S. foreign relations in the 1970s. (It helps having endorsements from big name historians like John Lewis Gaddis, Matthew Connelly, and Emily Rosenberg). Sargent makes an argument that I myself have increasingly come to believe during my two and a half years of graduate study--that American officials cast aside ideas about the Cold War global order well before the collapse of communism in 1989-1991. Sargent argues that the structure of the international order had so drastically changed in the 1970s, that the structural and ideological underpinnings of the Cold War were no longer predominant, either in fact or in the minds of American foreign policymakers. Sargent therefore inserts himself among an as yet very small group of scholars like Anders Stephenson and Matthew Connelly who have attempted to de-emphasize the role of the Cold War in American foreign relations after World War II.

I can certainly accept Sargent's argument that globalization had drastically changed the nature of the international order into a post-Cold War world during the 1970s. I don't know, however, if I can fully support his idea that the Cold War as an ideological construct (or in more popular terms, a "global imaginary") lost precedence among government officials during the 1970s. In my opinion, it would be more accurate to place the end of the Cold War as an American global imaginary to 1984-1985, with Reagan's easing of relations with the Soviet Union and the attempt to create a new globalist ideology centered on rogue states and international terrorism. By arguing, as Sargent does, that American government officials no longer thought primarily in Cold War terms by the 1970s, I think he neglects the renewal of the so-called "second Cold War" during Reagan's first term. Like I said, though, I have yet to finish the book and he may address these critiques later on. Also, since I'm not sure I clearly stated it before, Sargent doesn't claim that the Cold War ended in the 1970s. He argues (somewhat) less controversially that the Cold War paradigm simply took less precedence over other foreign policy outlooks during the 1970s like, for instance, Carter's emphasis on human rights. To put briefly, Sargent's book is going to be a must read for anyone interested in 20th century American foreign relations or global history, and from what I've read so far I highly recommend it.

I've taken the plunge with Ed Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. It's a good read that's teaching me a lot, since the only other survey of American slavery I've read was much more global in scope. Baptist focuses on the Cotton Kingdom's development and does a very good job of situating it in the broader story of the early republic. I haven't gotten up to the later decades yet, but he seems poised to continue along in the same mold.

Reading Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution a classic work of Marxist Historiography. It analyses the various radical movements that emerged during the period that he, and others of the Marxist Historiographic tradition, refer to as The English Revolution, the English Civil War. Haven't made much progress so far, it's mostly providing background from which the social movements emerged. So far it has delivered an overview of the radical religious sects of the time - Anabaptists and Familists for example - and the irreligion of the time, which was more widespread than I had imagined; especially among the lower classes. It has also looked at 'Masterless Men', those free from feudal ties, independent laborers and vagabonds for example, as well as squatters on common land, and it has looked at the contempt in which these were held by the landed classes. Very interesting so far, and I look forward to those chapters on the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters. Also got Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century by the same, which is simply a collection of essays broadly converging on the titled topic. I may dip in here and there to complement the reading of The World Turned Upside Down, but I think Upside Down will be the better work, as it was written much later (so with added knowledge and experience) by the author.

Currently I am reading "The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840" by Jack Larkin. It's a popular book (no footnotes, gah) but it includes lots of wonderful tidbits about life in the Early Republic and the transition from a pre-industrial society to a society that was shaped in all aspects by industrialization. It also covers the cultural shift from the more traditional mores of the 18th and early 19t century (extensive drinking, frequent premarital sex, large family sizes) into the more self-controlled based mores of 'Victorian' society (more religiosity, emphasis on moral self-improvement as a means of social mobility, beginnings of the cult of motherhood and female purity).

I spent the summer and fall of 2014 reading popular histories of the United States Civil War. Was completely surprised with how little I actually knew. Currently working my way through The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans by Charles Royster and Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S.C. Gwynne. And as with my past reading, learning how little I know about the period.

Edit:Spelling

Is there a historical narrative of Peru post-independence? I am currently reading A History of Chile, 1808–2002 and it is an excellent narrative of Chile, and I was wondering if there is a similar work but with Peru instead.

Yesterday I started F. W. Mote's History of Imperial China: 900-1800. You could guess the basic description from the title, but it's a massive and deeply interesting book. There are detailed chapters on Chinese politics and society in the Song Dynasty, but also descriptions of China's neighbors.

To take one example, there is the Khitan Empire, also known as the Liao Dynasty. They arose in the early 10th century in what is now Mongolia and northeastern China. They continued to expand by attacking neighboring tribes and eventually into China 'proper'. One major part of Mote's history is a discussion of their unique governmental system, first instituted by Abaoji, the first emperor of the Khitans. It was a 'dual government', with a Northern Administration, which ruled over the more nomadic territories, and the Southern Administration, which resembled in structure and function the Chinese bureaucratic system.

It's all fascinating stuff. I'm about to begin the part where the Jurchens invade. I look forward to reading the rest of it.