I have two different things to post! I will make them separate comments.

ONE: io9 of all places wrote a very decent article on the castrati. Color me ???! My husband firmly thinks this person was inspired by AskHistorians and my toot-tooting eunuchs all over it, and at first I blew him off (because the castrati ain’t exactly a secret and very little I say is my own original research) until the same author published this piece which lined up suspicously well with a recent AMA… HMMMM.

SHOW YOURSELF IO9 SPY. I WANT TO TELL YOU THAT YOU DID A GOOD JOB ON BOTH ARTICLES BUT THAT YOU SHOULD MENTION ASKHISTORIANS.

Research is my thing for the next two months--direct from the archives. This week I've been chasing down the fraught processes of land delimitation and associated survey efforts in the Cape Colony before 1830, an era with a lot of received knowledge (even mythology) and precious little really good research on the subject. Elphick's Kraal and Castle and some older works like Van der Merwe's Die Trekboer in die geskiedenis van die Kaapkolonie, Christopher's Crown Lands of British South Africa, and a few others (Elphick & Giliomee for example) do good service to some of the basics but we have a limited understanding of just what people were really doing out there with the grants and surveys prior to the big Commission of Enquiry in 1825 and 1826. It turns out the Royal Engineers were in the middle of a trigonometrical and topographical (but not cadastral, it seems) survey of the entire colony at that point, but records of that activity are very thin on the ground. I want to find them--likewise for some of the other Royal Engineers' surveys that were channeled through the Colonial Secretary in Cape Town later. They're not in Chatham or in Kew, so there's not really anyplace else they could be.

So what does it mean to find this material, and see that aspiration and treasury were so far apart? Well, it puts more nails in the coffin of certainty regarding the legality of deeds and grants--in fact some landowners are contesting red-line data (where the title deed and surveyed figures differ owing to overlap or mismeasure, the latter is drawn with a red line and may or may not have legal power pending contest) to this very day. But it also gets us into the heads of survey officers and government officials who desperately wanted precise data but had to decide when and where that wish trumped economy and tranquility. Surveying lands did, after all, really really upset people when it either made them liable for higher rents or taxes, or else lowered their land's value by diminishing the legal size. I hope to find evidence of just how they were thinking about measuring land, making grants, and assaying the colony in those days before the expansion of the D'Urban, Smith, and Grey eras.

Oh, and for the South Africans here: the Royal Engineer in charge of this early survey was also involved in laying out the settlements and fortifications for the 1820 Settlers. The person they contracted to build the barracks for the garrison was one Piet Retief, who did such a shoddy job and cut so many corners (according to them) that they voided the contract and demolished the structure. This made him quite angry at the British government, because he had his own bills to pay, and may have materially fed into his decision to quit the colony as a leader of the Trek parties a decade later.

I am writing my masters in history on British Fascism, so I´m reading up on Griffin - Nature of Fascism and anything I can find by Richard Thurlow and on to cover the histography. It´s really interesting! But I need to find a article to describe Oswald Mosleys meeting in the Olympia in 1934 and an article on 'the Marconi incident.' Any sugestions?

I just started Shirli Gilbert's Music in the Holocaust, a monograph whose name should explain pretty well what the book is about. I've only made it through the introduction so far, but she brings up some really interesting historiographical points. She describes the tradition of "Spiritual Resistance," wherein post-war secondary literature on the Holocaust, as well as survivors' testimonies, sought to ascribe meaning to the suffering of inmates' by telling a story of resistance through "re-humanizing efforts" and efforts to maintain continuity with pre-War cultural traditions. She cautions that this tradition treats the inmate communities as a monolith and revels in a healthy dose of historical determinism. She offers as a correction to this bias the idea that inmates' (as well as Ghetto-denizens') thoughts about their futures and fates under the Nazi regime were not always ultimately of death, and that their expectations for the future changed daily, if not hourly. She argues that if inmates' weren't constantly under the impression that they would ultimately be killed, then "spiritual resistance" cannot be the only context through which to view communal musical expressions in the camps. Some were morose, some hopeful, some simply focused on the pain and hunger of everyday camp life. She also warns that failing to look at the camps' inmates within their socio-political and ethnic groups prevents the historian from properly contextualizing the musical expressions of the various groups. Largely assimilated German Jews, for example, would use music in different ways than Polish Jews or political prisoners within the same camp. She ends her introduction by bringing up issues of remembrance and problems inherent to testimony in the field of Holocaust history.

Sorry if these issues are well-trodden by those of you more knowledgeable of the Holocaust field; this is one of my first introductions to academic Holocaust history, so I'm being exposed to the historiographical debates for the first time.

Does anyone know of any books on translating and/or interpreting in China (any time period, or even East Asia in general). I've already read Rachel Lung's monograph Interpreters in Early Modern China.

Hey folks, I'm looking for recommendations for books about North African history, especially Berber history. Books with more emphasis on internal affairs instead of just how the region relates to European history are appreciated.

Historians (especially you early modern/medieval European historians): I've been reading The Problem of Unbelief by Lucien Febvre. I've found it quite compelling (mainly because I think the approach he lays out is quite anthropological), but I'm curious what the opinion of historians focusing on that time period are. Where are the faults as you see them from your field, whether methodologically, in terms of data, or in the analysis?

Archaeologists tend to be very good at taking other field's theoretical positions long after they've been discarded in that field, or taking them without the necessary critiques. Just trying to do my due diligence that I don't start using something without knowing the critique of it.