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'm fairly new to reddit and to this sub in general, but just want to say I'm really enjoying it so far! Anyway, I've been obsessed with Mormonism recently. I finished up with Matthew Bowman's The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith and I'm currently working on Richard Lyman Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. I have to say it's one of the more engaging biographies I've come across in quite some time. It's one of the few volumes you're likely to find on a professional historian's shelf as well as a practicing member of the LDS church. Bushman does an excellent job of weaving Joseph's story into the larger fabric of religious experience in the early 1800's and, in doing so, describes the development of early Mormon doctrine. If anybody else has read it, I welcome your thoughts. I'd also like to request any other recommendations on LDS history, biography or otherwise.
I have two areas I'm studying currently. Working on my Undergraduate Thesis for next fall, and a longer research paper for a class this semester.
• Undergrad Thesis is on a comparison of the military campaigns of Vespasian and Trajan. Reading through a lot of material, but just finished up Rome's First Frontier: The Flavian Occupation of Northern Scotland. Very interesting book, lots of diagrams, which I like. Also read biographies of Vespasian and Trajan recently, two interesting and great generals and emperors.
• My current research paper is on the counterinsurgency in Vietnam and why it failed. My two main points are that it failed because of the ineffectiveness in the accepted strategies and tactics, and the inability to win the hearts and minds of the local population. Couple of really interesting books on that. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife by John Nagl and Phoenix and the Birds of Prey by Mark Moyar. Really interesting topics, especially when you look at how the Marines had a good thing going with Combined Action Program but the Army and the commanding levels of authority in Vietnam thought the Search and Destroy tactics were better than pacification and working with the local villagers.
Anyways, super interesting stuff. If anyone has any suggestions I'd be happy to hear, always looking for new material!
I'm looking for books specifically on the African theater of World War I and am yet to find much of anything. Any pointers in the right direction?
I'm reading various books for a 1920s paper on the Ku Klux Klan