Currently reading Marie Arana's Bolívar. Engrossing stuff - he was a very complicated man whose life was as interesting as his time. The whole Venezuelan struggle for independence is fascinating, and full of wild stuff: you've got an army called the Legions of Hell and ear-collecting killers. I'd really appreciate any recommendations of books about the period, or more detail about Bolívar's life - it feels like there's a lot of interesting stuff the biography is barely touching on. (Also if the bio has some well known factual errors, it'd be handy to know early).

I'm currently re-reading P.H.Wilson's "Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War" and loving every minute of it- his sections on the Austrian Habsburgs are of greatest interest to me, and I'm hungrily scribbling down every relevant reference for more reading material afterwards. Wilson lays out old and new arguments and analyses of events, making sure the reader has a proper context for understanding them, and then advances his own argument with well-sourced evidence. Stuff that ought to be quite dry becomes almost concerningly interesting- you'll suddenly realise you never knew just how much more you wanted to know about the makeup of the Inner Austrian estates!

Oh, and I guess we don't have many Austrian history enthusiasts as I've asked for books before and come up empty but if anyone has any good recommendations I'd love to hear them.

A few years back, Robin Fleming wrote a great piece about recycling in post Roman Britain. In it, she argues that Britain's metal economy collapsed after the fall of the Roman empire, with the consequence that iron smelting all but disappeared for more than a century, and Britain's post-Roman and early Anglo-Saxon inhabitants were forced to rely on poor quality recycled metal for their tools, which had a negative impact on their quality of life. It's a great article - very well researched and thought-provoking.

So I set out, this past week, to discover what, precisely, was being made from recycled iron. Archaeometallurgists have analyzed several hundred iron artifacts using a technique called metallography, which reveals the metal's chemical composition, construction methods, and heat treatments. You can reconstruct how an iron tool was made, and what it was made from. My goal has been to see whether, as Fleming claims, we see evidence for recycled iron being used, and whether this reaults in a decreased standard of living.

So far, the answer is exciting and complex. Some types of objects (spears, especially) are clearly being made from recycled metal. For other types of objects, the evidence is uncertain (knives), or instead points toward the use of new materials instead of recycled (most swords). I haven't finished sifting all the data yet, but iron recycling appears to have been a deliberate choice used in specific situations for specific types of objects, and not a forced response to necessity and scarcity.

This data becomes more interesting when read against writen sources, which suggest social and ritual uses for spears that might make it appropriate to forge them from recycled metal...but that part remains to be written.

Here's installment #2 of my "recently read book reviews." In the previous installment from several weeks ago I reviewed Konrad Jarausch's Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century and H.W. Brands' Reagan: The Life.

Sarotte, Mary Elise. The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

In The Collapse, Mary Elise Sarotte provides a narrative history of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a topic she has recently written about in her masterful 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. Whereas most histories of the fall of the Berlin Wall have asked why it fell, Sarotte asks what she believes to be the more fundamental question: how did it fall? As she states, “it is necessary to figure out how the Berlin Wall opened first, before moving on to why.” (xx)

The answers to the author’s question of how, she argues, lie not in an analysis of political leaders, but in the stories of ordinary East and West Germans—border guards, German dissidents, and mid-level government officials. In tracing the stories of such people, Sarotte attempts to demonstrate that the fall of the Berlin Wall was not planned by Soviet leaders or caused by Ronald Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric, nor was it preordained by the long-term structural weaknesses of the communist system. For the Wall to collapse, it required the actions (often spontaneous) of ordinary Germans and a series of unfortunate actions—“accidents, some of them mistakes so minor that they might otherwise be trivialities”—by the East German government on the night of November 9-10.

Sarotte focuses her narrative on the lives of roughly a dozen Germans, mostly East German dissidents. She sets the stage for the events of November 9 by first examining the massive protests that occurred in Leipzig a month prior, on October 9th. On that day, activists throughout East Germany (roughly 75,000) arrived in the city to protest against government repression by marching on the “ring road” that encompassed the city center. East German officials on the ground at the time made the fateful decision to not quash the peaceful protest, which thereby provided greater momentum to the dissident movement and appeared to validate the efficacy of non-violent protest. After the October 9th demonstration in Leipzig, protesters became more emboldened and less fearful that the regime would retaliate with force.

A month later, on November 9th, a series of missteps by East German and East Berlin officials led to the accidental opening of the Wall. The initial misstep began with a bungled press conference in which Gunter Schabowski, a member of the East German Politburo, mistakenly claimed that the Berlin Wall would open “right away”. (The Politburo had actually passed a law to open the wall at an indeterminate time in the future). Soon after the conference, East Germans flocked to the Wall in the hopes of stepping foot in the West. Soon after, a series of contingencies and accidents led thousands of East Berliners into West Germany and, eventually, to the demolition of the Wall. One notable example Sarotte provides of the contingent nature of the Wall’s collapse is the story of Harald Jagar, the East German head of passport control at the Berlin Wall. As the highest-ranking soldier at the Wall, it was Jagar’s duty to decide the course of action he and his subordinates would take against the East Germans citizens who were gathering in ever-greater numbers. Unsure of what to do—whether to let them pass or to force them back—Jagar called his supervisor. While still on the phone, the supervisor made a hushed comment to an individual standing next to him about Jagar’s cowardice. Upon hearing the insult, Jagar became apoplectic and decided to let the East Germans through, thereby opening the floodgates into the West and demonstrating to the crowd that they would encounter little to no resistance from the border guards. The Collapse is filled with many stories similar to Jagar’s, stories that show that big events are often the result of mundane and otherwise insignificant actions.

The Collapse ultimately provides a much needed counter-argument to the myths espoused by American triumphalists, who claim that it was the United States that brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall. In sum, Sarotte does an excellent job in providing a well-written history that will hold value for both scholars and layreaders of an event that many Americans know far too little about.

Upcoming Reviews

Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

Alfred McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

I did something very mean to James Holland, author of The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History; May-October 1940. Previous to Holland's book, I read Joseph Maiolo's Cry Havoc. That book is simply outstanding. it is well-written, and gives greater context to the buildup to WWII via an economic lens. Reading Cry Havoc was like seeing another dimension to a narrative I already knew quite well. After Holland I began to read Rick Atkonson's The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945. Atkinson is a skilled writer, and his word choice alone makes the book a worthwhile purchase. It is as stellar as the previous two works in that trilogy. So reading Holland between two stellar authors is possibly very unfair and mean.

And I don't care.

Holland's book doesn't make the argument that he thinks it makes. He gives an excellent account of the Dowding System, Chain Home and Chain Home Low, as well as the various capabilities and drawbacks of the machines and men. He has a number of vivid accounts from pilots on both sides, which is excellent. He makes the argument that the Battle of Britain actually starts with the Battle of France. I concede that he has a point given that the attritional warfare in the air began at that point, but the subject could have been covered in a couple paragraphs or a chapter. Instead it takes up over half of the book. Worse, the author diverges into accounts of the ground war (highlighting Guderian, Rommel, and von Luck). I'm sorry, but the Battle of Britain was not fought on the ground.

Worst of all, he makes the argument that the Luftwaffe was ground down during the fighting and that the RAF gained strength--but he doesn't provide the kind of proof to make that argument airtight. This portion of the book gets far less space than the ground war, or even the u-boat war (he keeps harping on the idea of the possibility of dozens of u-boats and how that could have changed the war, but he doesn't talk about the choices that went into how the u-boat fleet was made). It's frustrating, because I agree with his argument but Holland doesn't prove it.

So I might have been mean to Holland by reading him between such luminaries as Maiolo and Atkinson, but Holland's book would have been a disappointment regardless of when I read it.

I'm finally most of the way through David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I found the stuff about the origin of currency informative, but dull -- chapter after chapter debunking the "barter theory of money" was more attention than the subject deserved, my eyes kept glazing over. The Iron Age section was nit-pickable but sound and thoughtful. I'm up to the late Renaissance/early industrial section, and finding it much more interesting and better argued -- not least of which because it's so much easier to source.

I think this one's going to go into the same category as Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians -- a book that I didn't enjoy and I'm not sure I'd recommend, but that, on balance, I'm glad to have read.

Good lord, so much research this weekend!!! I'm interning at a museum which has a huge permanent collection exhibition coming up in less than a month. For some insane reason they're having me write the didactics for a bunch of pieces. (ʘ言ʘ╬)

However, the other really cool project they gave me was to verify the authenticity of three "Rodin" watercolor drawings which were part of an estate bequest to the museum back in 1994. During his later years, 1900-1906, he did a ton (and I mean hundreds) of figure studies with nude models in motion. They're very loose images especially compared to his studies for sculpture but very interesting nonetheless (especially the sheer number of models he had who were basically just... how do I put it... spread open?). So, I've been pouring through catalogue raisonné trying to find these pieces, to no avail. Based on some of the provenance the museum has on the pieces (and their absence from the catalogues) I'm highly inclined to believe that they are in fact by a prolific Rodin forger named Ernst Durig.

The museum also has a lot of items in the permanent collection which are either Native American artifacts, contemporary works by Native artists, or works with Native Americans as subject by non-Native artists. As a result, I've been doing a lot on Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo ceremonialism specifically as it pertains to water. What's really the most surprising thing to me is that the majority of sources I'm finding are quite old (early 20th century mostly). I'm curious to know who might be writing about these tribes now, and why the research I've been finding is overwhelmingly so old.

The rest of the research I'm doing covers artists working within the past 25 years so not really relevant here. :)

Does anyone know any good biographies on Freud & Jung, I know about Peter Gay's Freud: A Life For Our Time & Deirdre Bair's Jung: A Biography but there are so many biographies on the two famous Psychologists, so do you have any suggestions on which I should read?

Also does anyone have any books about the History of Vienna? Thank you :)

I finally got around to actually reading a book I bought several months ago but never had time to read: Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. It's already pretty interesting, with a discussion on how difficult it is to determine the voice of the subaltern (in this case, prostitutes) from the voices of more dominant groups (nineteenth century literati, middle-class petty urbanites, health authorities, etc) in the first half of the chapter. I think I'm totally going to enjoy this one. :)

Reading more about Ming and Qing society.

I never knew Chinese vagabonds could be so interesting.

Hello! My brother is looking for fun history books to read. On Reddit, I've seen Cartoon History of the Modern World (Larry Gonick) and World History: The Comic (Zak Zabell). Those are the types of graphic novels/comics/cartoony things he enjoys. Would you say they're good for a teenage boy? He's liked some stuff like Persepolis previously so I thought that style of thing would be good. Can anyone recommend any other graphic novels, comics or cartoons about history, especially Eastern European or British history? Whether it's very specific ('the formation of the Kievan rus' : the Comic') or something as broad as the two I'm planning to get (unless it turns out they're bad, I guess)!

Also, I've been reading The Plimsoll Sensation (Nicolette Jones). It's fantastic. I know very little about Plimsoll but the book is gripping, enjoyable and very readable. As a lay person, it was great to find a book which was packed with details, had a lot of notes and used a fair amount of technical vocabulary which was also well laid out and not difficult to read. As well as talking about the life of Samuel Plimsoll, the ship owners of the time and the sailors, it also talked about the situation for women too, and gave many interesting snippets about his relationship with his daughter and siblings. I'd recommend it to anyone- I know nothing about ships, sailing or the navy, very little about the Victorian Parliament, but I came away from the book with new knowledge, a new interest and a lot of books on my further reading list.

I'm currently looking at building up a paper for a book on a philanthropist that fled Lithuania in 1898.

I'm looking for some good sources about how Lithuania came into Russian rule, the Cantonists, the mass exoduses of Jews from Lithuania in the 19th century, May Laws (and subsequent laws), and any other aspect of this time period.

(For the next few months I'm living in a wilderness so internet access is non-existent and really hampering research, so if I could focus it down to save time it would be awesome!)

Just got through Michael Jacoff's The Horses of St. Mark and the Quadriga of the Lord. Very dry but comprehensive analysis of the iconographic program of a 13th century Basilica di San Marco. His book is about the four bronze horses that were looted from Constantinople by the Venetians shortly after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, who then placed the statues on the loggia on the west facade of the church in an attempt to create an iconographic frontispiece to the theological themes elaborated in the mosaics and liturgy of the interior.

I'll try to summarize his argument. Essentially he's claiming that the appearance of the west facade after its rennovation in the 13th century can be recreated by assuming that five bas-relief panels depicting Christ and the Evangelists which are now awkwardly clumped together above a portal on the north facade were originally located within the arch behind the horses so that the composition would evoke the Medieval theological concept of the Quadriga Domini; an image that puts Christ as the driver of a chariot with the four Evangelists as the wheels that propel the vehicle forward.

I disagree with his thesis, and presumably most other academics in the field reject the arguments put forth in this book. Most scholarship on the reuse of Byzantine sculpture in Venice's chiesa d'oro is phrased in very cautious language, and often much of the writing consists of exhaustive lists of available evidence about the Byzantine spolia (e.g. anecdotes from literary sources, iconographically similar artwork) so that the authors can excuse themselves of making speculative guesses at the original meaning of the Byzantine spoila. Most references to this book are limited to an acknowledgement of its existence, without the writers expressing whether they agree or disagree with Jacoff's argument.

This book was written in the 90s, and the most recent phase of scholarship (based on 'postcolonial critical theory', which looks at the iconography as synthesizing Venice's obsession with things from their three major trading partners the Byzantine Empire, the Latin East, and Fatimid Egypt) on San Marco really only began about a decade ago. Most of these writers are Medieval art professors at major research institutions (Doaks, Yale, Johns Hopkins, British School in Rome, etc.), which has led to a sort of hot-boxing of erudition, pretension, and elitism in their analyses.

More than their most recent scholarship however, I believe that Jacoff's work epitomizes everything that is wrong with scholarship on Medieval art. His argument is based nearly entirely on an encyclopedic list of available images and literary evidence from the Duecento/Trecento, which assumes that a major public/religious monument comprised of plundered statues constructed in the largest metropolis in Europe at the time came entirely out of an iconographic heritage (analyzed by cross-referencing images of chariots in triumphal processions, references of ancient statuary in Petrarch and Dante, descriptions of the Quadrige Domini in theological treatises, 13th century monumental sculpture, etc.). This perspective fails to take into account the complex social organization of Venice's trade empire that would have brought the horses to their capital city, and abruptly rejects the now more accepted argument that the horses' placement on the west facade was an attempt by the Venetian doge to recreate the space of imperial judgement and liturgy in Constantinople, the Hippodrome, at Venice's recently constructed equivalent, the Piazza San Marco.

I'm planning on perusing Jstor articles on various aspects of the 13th century decorative program such as "the Labours and the Months" archivolt, the Pala d'Oro, and candleholders in the Tesoro. I'm also planning on rereading the Doaks symposium on San Marco, which is perhaps the most helpful book on this subject. I've also been translating Duecento charters from Venetian archives in my free time, and by the end of the summer I need to tackle Otto Demus' giant tome on San Marco. So hopefully by the end of the summer I can be an amateur expert on art in Duecento Venice.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/07/book-review-greg-grandin-the-empire-of-necessity-slavery-freedom-and-deception-in-the-new-world

Do any scholars have suggestions for a book on the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Empire? Preferably one that is academic rather than popular. It's a period in which I'm deeply fascinated with and would like to read anything I can about it.

Just bought Margaret Wood's The English Medieval House. Not sure how up to date it is but I wanted to give it a read.

Also re-reading The Knight and the Blast Furnace because it comes up a lot here.