Venetian palazzi. Apparently their facades are mostly an addition of the Renaissance period. Some parts of the facades with windows and column capitals survive from the twelfth century, and were part of buildings that are more similar to Byzantine castles than Italian city palaces.

I've been reading Jurgen Schulz's The New Palaces of Medieval Venice, an extraordinary work. It makes some of the boldest claims I've been able to find on duecento sculptural workshops in Venice, and his comprehensive knowledge of the layout, documentary history, and decoration of the palazzi is very useful as a general resource for my research.

Do any medievalists or art historians among you know of anything worth reading on Byzantine castles/palaces? I feel like this is part of my research that I don't have a full knowledge of and learning about it might help me visualize the artistic precedent and function of earlier palazzi.

I'm finishing up Excavations at Tizapan El Alto, Jalisco by Clement W. Meighan and Leonard J. Foote. Tizapan is a Postclassic (and possibly Epiclassic) mound and cemetary site on the south shore of Lake Chapala. The excavators found what sounds like pseudo-cloisonné vessels as well as copper items like needles, bells, a finger ring, and a slug (looks like copper axe money to me), figure fragments, a possible ceramic wheel for a toy, and cranial deformed skulls in a bilobial shape (a literal "butthead") as well as your typical sloped shape found in other areas of Mesoamerica.

Neat stuff, totally unrelated to my thesis or focus on the earlier Classic and Late Formative periods. But it is all about that perspective.

I finally got around to reading King Leopold's Ghosts and I'm devouring it. Hochschild does a great job of blending nuanced historical analysis with considerable narrative powers. I could do without all the psychoanalysis though--I'm not really sure how well connected Leopold's absent father and colonial obsession was.

On the plus side, we can add an item to the list of History's Monsters' Petty Crimes: Leopold did not allow his new wife to ride on a gondola in Venice on their honeymoon.

I'm a college sophomore looking to start his second research project soon. I'm really interested in doing work researching the historical accuracy of the Spike TV miniseries Tut that aired last week. Does anybody have some good book suggestions that could get me started on King Tut?

Doing a lot of research this week on the Chukchi experience between 1917 and 1948. Really fascinating how Alaskan businessmen kept supplying the region even after the Bolshevik Revolution.

My wife just brought me home Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwinne. It appears to be a history of the post-CivilWar interactions between the Comanches and the U.S. It's another history by a journalist, but since 1491 I'm no longer the skeptic of this genera that I once was. I'm kinda under the weather, so I'm hoping this will be a fun diversion.

Been reading a lot in the past several months about the huge subject of the American Civil Rights Movement, and of late have focused more narrowly on the role of women in that movement. To that end, I finished Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, which was an admirably patient telling of Baker's incredible development and life, and have just dived into Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. So far there's much less about gender than I'd hoped, but there's a lot of time for it to develop.

I'd love more suggestions in this area from anyone familiar with the best works in the field.