I'm reading Venice: A New History by Thomas Madden after looking for a history of Venice on the AskHistorians book list. It's quite good so far, very easy to read and very informative. I might go with something a little more in depth after I finish this one.

As research, and a little bit for pleasure, I've been actually working my way through An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis by Mogens Herman Hansen. I'm almost 1000 pages in with no end in sight.... To briefly explain what it is, it's essentially an encyclopaedia of all known ancient Greek city-states (poleis), which also lists settlements that were not politically independent, archaeological sites that have no historically-referred-to city that we know they were, etc. It also has large essays about key concepts relating to ancient Greek polis life, politics etc at the front, before the Catalogue itself, and a huge number of collated shorthand lists at the end regarding things such as 'what forms of government did this polis have, and when', or 'which of the Panhellenic games did X city receive representatives from' or 'what was the Greek name for inhabitants of this city'.

It's relatively dry, except it also isn't. It restores almost blinding diversity to a world so dominated in the modern imagination by such a few cities- at best people generally run into Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, and maybe Syracuse on a good day. Athens and Sparta in particular dominate the conception of Classical Greece for most of the modern era. Not every city listed can have a history attached to it, but many do, and it becomes a much more lived-in world to imagine as a consequence.

Research this week has been on two things, the Civil Rights Movement in Florence, South Carolina and the Concerned Citizens of South Carolina. They were an organization of white clergy that spoke out against segregation in the state in 1955. The Governor spoke out against them in the state press and they suffered for it, two were removed from their church, two left the state and one left the country. I've been focusing in on finding the members that're still alive (if there are any) as well as finding more details on their organizational goals.

I'm traveling to Spain and I'd like some books on this history of the country. I'm a historian, so scholarly titles are not a problem for me.

I'm reading about the El Opeño shaft tomb from Michoacan. It is the earliest shaft tomb we know about to date, Early Formative. It's kind of odd it is in Michoacan because Michoacan seems to not share the shaft tomb cultural tradition that Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima share, Middle Formative to Early Classic.

Mysteries of Archaeology!

I'm currently reading about the Eighteenth century British enlightenment and their views on imperialism. But mostly I'm focusing on the context, since 'imperialism' as a concept came about in the 19th century (see the book by Thornton and the chapter by Mayall) and the writers were only really considered as the Enlightenment from the demise of the use of the Age of Reason in the mid-twentieth century. It seems to me that from what can then be approximated the general response was one of increasing positivity towards imperialism (as the existence of empire became more the norm), increasing negativity towards slavery, and then usually suggestions of modifications rather than outright anti-imperialism as such.

I like conceptual questions which challenge what we might expect. E.g. here, just because these people were citizens of empire, that doesn't mean they were blind supporters; equally just because they were relatively progressive thinkers of the time, that doesn't mean they were progressive in all areas, nor that they were simply against colonialism (and elements of what later became imperialism).

The In Our Time: History podcast episode on The Enlightenment in Scotland is useful for general background here.

There was also the latest episode of The History of Byzantium podcast, which talked about why the Romans survived after the Arab conquests in the 7th century (whilst the Sassanids fell). That made some interesting points about the development of the Roman state in the 7th century according to reduced income and reduced or changed needs. It also re-emphasised why Constantinople was such a good capital city. It lay not only behind the Theodosian walls but, to paraphrase the podcast, behind two mountain ranges and across the Bosphorus on the European side. In addition, the currents and winds on the nearby areas of the Mediterranean all made it much harder to approach Constantinople than to leave it. So that development on the basic Theodosian Walls and grand harbour Chain concepts was very interesting. It also discussed about how the Roman army was beginning to use the Theme system and had become much smaller and essentially just cavalry by this point, with some soldiers who were mostly farmers and were occasionally called up to use their training on campaign. It's almost like a reversion to the original model of early Rome.

I keep finding gems of primary texts over at Project Gutenberg. I have been digging lately through the Clark ( 1899) 2-volume edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives. I originally had a copy of the Dick edition (1949), for a long while the commonest. This had a truly excellent introduction; a fine portrait of the mid-17th century English world, drawn from Aubrey's miscellaneous notes and jottings, but until seeing the Clark edition at Gutenberg I had no idea how much Dick had carved away of the various Lives to make a one-volume edition. If you've an interest in 17th c. England, and only know the Dick edition, this is worth checking out. It's rambling, disjointed, redundant, but other than some predictable Victorian excision of lewd language it is all there.

/u/cordis_melum helpfully suggested Tombstone by Yang Jisheng as a nice overview but also containing some depth into the Great Chinese Famine. I've got my hands on the Chinese version and it seems to be quite the read, although I don't think I've read enough to formulate a proper comment. It's definitely captivating.

Yesterday's haul: I found a book that had English translations of documents from the Eighth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party at the non-profit leftest bookstore yesterday. The historian in me went "YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS".

In other news, I finished The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter this week. Thought it was an interesting read, although some of the quotes in the book weren't cited, so now I'm wondering where they came from. I'm probably going to try to finish Eating Bitterness (the book about the GLF) the following week, and then move on to finishing Following the Leader about CCP leadership post-Mao period.