Finished rereading Violencd and Society in the Medieval West, Guy Halsall. It's very interesting and also readable, although now I have a long list of books to request from the library. Also, I read some awesome articles on the medievalist website, for research, common violence: vengeance and inquisition in 14th century Marseille which was a useful look at the court system in Marseille. But also depressing in some ways as frankly reading about historic murders is not the most enjoyable thing in the world. Also read a really interesting article about the history of the Kraken which was much more enjoyable.

I'm reading Excavations at Cojumatlan, Michoacan by Robert Lister which was published in the 40s. Cojumatlan is a site on the southeastern shore of Lake Chapala and appears to be a Postclassic site with a high density of activity. Lister was able to recover a Tlaloc censor which to me is really impressive because gods in this region tend to be difficult to identify. I haven't reached the section in which he describes the object, but I'm wondering if it is some sort of import.

I finished Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa on Thursday. Really good book, well written and informative. I've now started Peter Frankopan's The First Crusade: The Call from the East which seems good so far, although I've only read the introduction. Frankopan is definitely setting out to turn a lot of conventional thought on the Crusades on its head by using primarily Byzantine source material so it should be a really interesting read. I'm also looking forward to reading a book that's only ~200 pages after the almost 700 pages that Scramble spanned.

Roman historians, are there any sources you could recommend on the Triarii and their origins? Were they Etruscan in the beginning, or a Roman development, do we know how far back we can look into their history? Thanks guys!

Read a couple of Revolutionary War pension applications this past week that referred to the battle of White Plains (part of the New York campaign) as the battle of "York city" which I thought was a rather odd way to refer to New York city.

I was also reading some militia reports and find it interesting that New England was still using the Middle English "ye" (meaning "the") throughout the Revolutionary War at least.

Hey everyone, Does anyone have any good recommendations for books on The Bloomsbury Group? I've been watching BBC 2's Life in Squares but for the life of me I know as much about the TBG after watching it as I did before. That particular drama I felt was all over the place so I just wondered if anyone had any recommendations.

I'm especially interested in Virginia Woolf's mental health & her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, So If you have any books which focus specifically on that then I'd greatly appreciate it. Thank you :)

I've been reading a lot of history lately, and this gets fueled by my downloading the Kindle sample for, well, everything, and then agonizing over which book to read for reals.

/r/AskHistorians, help me choose which book to read next! I'm debating: All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Root of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer or God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan by Jonathan Spence.

Both are pretty introductory, I know, but I'm just getting into reading non-fiction. I technically have a B.A in East Asian Studies but I focused largely on Mandarin language so my historical knowledge is sorely lacking, but I do remembering thinking the Taiping Rebellion was fascinating. And then I've always been extremely interested in Iran for reasons I can't quite articulate.

Anyone read either? Or know of a better book on the subjects?