Dang, this thread was perfect timing!

What are some good books about George Washington? My dad doesn't open up a lot, but I overheard him talking to my mom about how he'd like to read something about George Washington. He mentioned being interested that one man is regarded as a nearly perfect leader hundreds of years after his death, so any books that examine the reasons for his fame would be perfect.

I've been putting together a list of sites where work on the Manhattan Project was done. It's becoming a very large list — around 240 sites so far. Most of these were very small and peripheral, of course, but I'm still interested in really trying to map out how something as large as the Manhattan Project came together.

Anyway, while poking around in my archival files yesterday, looking for something completely different, I stumbled across a really wonderful bit of trivia. One of the Manhattan Project sites was in... Cuba!

Batista Airfield, just southwest of Havana (now San Antonio de los Baños Airfield), was used as a destination point for long-distance test flights of the Enola Gay and other B-29s from Wendover Field, Utah. It was a training site for test runs for using the bomb in early 1945. A few of the references I found to it, here. Kind of neat, and surprising — I didn't really have a clue that there was a Cuban angle to the Manhattan Project.

It is nice that one can study something a long time and still find surprises when one digs into the archives. Part of this story is also that I have a huge amount of archival material scanned, from various sources (over 50 GB worth of photos, PDFs, etc.), so "digging in the archives" can be done at a coffee shop, in my case.

I just bought the Penguin edition of the Domesday Book and I'm putting local entries together for a local project thing. I asked a question here about Humphrey Goldenbollocks (mentioned in the book, from a local village) a while back and as the project involves kids, I'm undecided about using it, seeing as I can pick and choose. Definitely using the Frodo entries though.

Are there any good books for using alongside the Domesday book (eg giving a bit of context or background)?

I came across this article about how West Mexican shaft tombs were used in Kahlua advertisements from the 1960s to early 1990s. Vincent Price was apparently an avid collector of shaft tomb figures and it was his collection that Kahlua first used in their adverts along with his endorsements. I recall that Beekman had told me they were used in adverts, but I had never looked them up until the other day. I didn't even know someone bothered to write an article about it. I emailed Kahlua hoping to get some information from them and maybe some high quality scans, but I have not heard back from them. Still, it's pretty neat they had some exposure. My father recalls seeing them in the 80s and 90s, but didn't know they were shaft tomb figures.

I just started Medieval Magic and Society by Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Carolina Escobar-Vargas and I'm looking forward to actually getting into the meat of the book. I know basically nothing about the subject so it should be pretty interesting. It's only an entry level book (largely designed as an introductory text for undergraduate classes) but I'm fine with that. It has some primary sources copied into the back which I find especially appealing.

I'm also going to undertake the somewhat dangerous task here of asking for a book recommendation (dangerous because I always end up wanting too many books). My fiance recently gave me a gift card to the local bookshop and I thought I'd spend it on some non-medieval history as I'm generally trying to expand my knowledge of other areas of history. So with that in mind I'd like a recommendation for a good book that is very likely to currently be in a bookshop on any of the following subjects: African history, Indian history. South-East Asian history, and/or Central and South American History.

Reading a selection of William Lloyd Garrison's work from the liberator. So getting to see more of the reasons for the divide between different abolitionists groups such as Garrison-Douglas and then Douglas and Martin Delany

I'm getting ready for comps in the fall, so my reading list is long and varied this summer. At the moment, I'm reading Robin Frame's Political Development of the British Isles, 1100-1400. I've thoroughly enjoyed every thing of Frame's I've read, and this book is turning out to be equally good. Although Ireland often gets lumped in with Great Britain by other medievalists, it's actually fairly unusual to read a holistic treatment of the Isles that isn't primarily concerned with one or another of the regions in particular. I was talking with an Anglo-Saxonist at a conference this week about how odd it is that "Isles historians", especially medievalists, don't talk to each other very much. Frame's also makes for a nice companion to R.R. Davies's Domination and Conquest which I read just before this and which takes a similarly holistic approach.

I just want to ask are there any prominent authors for Roman history or essential books on the era? I generally like to stick to authors who I know are regarded highly, not sure if this is a good practice or not.