I finally found an academic-ish article discussing the finding of the 'oldest' fragment of the Qur'an from a few weeks ago! This new fragment actually raised even more questions rather than confirming our hypotheses; as Prof G Reynolds put it:

The upshot of all of these early dates is that the Qur’an may very well date earlier than Uthman, possibly much earlier. It may be time to rethink the story of the Qur’an’s origins, including the traditional dates of Muhammad’s career. In other words, what observers have celebrated as something like evidence of the traditional story of Islam’s origins (the New York Times article argued that the manuscript “offered a moment of unity, and insight, for the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims”) may actually be, when considered carefully, evidence that the story of Islam’s origins is quite unlike what we have imagined.

How do folks stay up to date with new books and research in their field? Now that I've been out of university for a few years, and working in unrelated fields, I feel pretty disconnected from the current research. Anybody have strategies for this, or better yet know of an internet place with updates on new (academic) LGBTQ history books and research?

Just started Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I by Alexander Watson. It's a socio-political investigation of the Central Powers societies during the War. I'm hoping it gives me a more balanced view of the War considering my specialization in the military affairs.

I'm also still trucking on Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and it's... coming along. Got about fifty pages till the invasion of Poland.

I have been looking for good books on COIN warfare and the tactics and challenges that come about when facing off in such conflicts. I would love some really detailed stuff and I don't mind which era it takes place in.

Any ideas would be very helpful.

I continue to re-read The Knight and the Blast Furnace, and it continues to bear fruit.

A while back, u/Ahhuatl asked me: "I don't know much about European warfare during the time period you specialize in but one of the aspects of this discussion that has always puzzled me is the question how prevalent plate armor was. I know the implementation of standing armies was uneven in Europe, so I was wondering if all soldiers had access to the kind of armors that rendered bows ineffectual?"

I answered at the time that in the latter half of the 15th century common infantrymen had access to jacks, brigandines and other armours that were very arrow resistant, as well as early examples of breastplates made especially for infantrymen. That was maybe good enough, but it leaves the question - how did infantry plate armour stack up? So I did a survey of infantry breastplates in Williams' book that were from the time and places where armour was widely heat-treated (northern Italy and Southern Germany, 1450-1550, roughly). I defined 'infantry breastplates' as simple breastplates that lacked a lance rest, but mostly I followed William's own identification of the breastplates as infantry or not.

Of the 19 listed matching the above criteria, 11 were heat treated (hardened by heating and quenching in some fashion). Roughly 58%. This very very brief survey, based on Williams research, shows that heat treatment was widely used in breastplates intended for infantry use, at least in the cities where armourers practiced heat treatment.

The caveat for this is that my survey methods were crude and may introduce bias (what is an ‘infantry breastplate’?), and also that many infantry armours were likely mass-produced in places like Koln that don’t seem to have heat-treated armour.

Speaking of which, when you combine this with his chapter's on fraud in the 16th century involving stamping Kolnisch armours with the Nuremberg mark, it seems like the main way that princes would economize on their infantry armour was to order armour from -cities- that specialized in cheaper armour, cities like Koln or Nuremberg (which was defrauding people and passing off Kolnisch armour as its own, quite possibly). They were using cheap imports, rather than getting a cheap model from a smith producing quality work. The upshot of this is that despite the quality of infantry armours from say, Innsbruck (there is evidence that even an order for 1,000 breastplates was hardened), it is quite likely that infantrymen would wear unhardened armour.

Went and bought an academic-oriented book, The Making of Modern Georgia, that is related to my thesis. Only issue that as its primarily directed at a university library audience, the cost was around $160US. I do believe it is now the most expensive thing I own, especially after considering the exchange rate, but it is going to be of real importance to my writing, especially the sources provided in the essays, and while the other university in town here has it, I can only take it out for 2 weeks at a time, and was not interested in doing that. And as I went and got the link for this I see Amazon dropped the price by $30 compared to when I bought it, which is just wonderful to see.

Genetic Evidence Supports the Multiethnic Character of Teopancazco, a Neighborhood Center of Teotihuacan, Mexico (AD 200-600)

I saw Linda Manzanilla present the initial findings of this paper at the SAAs two years ago in Austin. It's some great stuff.

I have been looking for English language books that are surveys of the history of China and have not been very successful.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Getting pretty serious - I just picked up the Bibliography of Native American Bibliographies.

I've also been reading a lot of 'beyond the human' type anthropology. I just finished Donna Haraway's When Species Meet and Eduardo Kohn's How Forest's Think yesterday. Up next, I'm gonna read Marianne Elisabeth Lien's Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish. What I'm going to do with all this, I'm not quite sure, but I think it'll probably be useful in approaching environmental history. Oh and Donna Haraway is wonderful.

I recently stumbled upon some interesting articles about S.O.E. and am now looking for a book that can give me some insight into the topic. There seem to be a lot, but I'm not sure which ones are worth the effort (as opposed to sloppy sensationalist overviews).

I'm looking for a book on the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. I didn't even realize there was a term for that movement until about a week ago and I'd love to get some in-depth info on how the movement came to be. Thanks!

On another note, what are some good 'Big History' books? Cross cultural, cross period stuff.