Where to start? This week I consulted easily the largest map I've ever had to use. It was about 2.5m by 3.5m, covering a district in deep detail for 1899. All allotments, and commons, farms, towns, and so forth, are extremely clear and numbered, although the information is often unreliable positionally. I had to walk on this with stocking feet very gingerly--it wasn't brittle or even stiff--and I took about a hundred pictures of it at various levels of zoom. No, I couldn't get the whole thing without taking the roof off of the Archives.

Other than that, I've been looking at survey regulations and attempts to enforce trigonometrical survey connection and control in the 19th century. It's a subtle subject, which requires that I look for sideways comments in other reports and comments. In the process, I've found some really interesting (and occasionally kind of funny) commentary about the profession as a whole.

My personal favorite, thus far, from a report on a government notice regarding the resurvey of certain farms:

No one familiarly acquainted with our rural population can have failed to hear many tales of the drunken Surveyors or the galloping careless Surveyors employed by the old Landdrosts and Heemraaden prior to the establishment of a Surveyor General's Office in 1828. As in popular tradition forgotten names are sometimes replaced by those known, those Surveyors employed by the Civil Commissioners up to 1840 or by this Department since that date may have suffered for the faults or imputed faults of their predecessors but in all this there is uncontrolled exaggeration & even admitting error within limits in our Land Registers I am still able to protest against this sweeping condemnation of old surveyors. My interest like that of some surveyors would be to proclaim the opposite opinion [and get powers to totally resurvey everything, but it would be too expensive for you.]

C. D. Bell (SG) to Colonial Secretary, 19/12/1865, SG 2/1/2/9, Western Cape Archives

I'm curious about the tales of the drunken surveyors. These complaints haven't come out in the records yet, but I see allusions to them almost everywhere in southern Africa. I'm also discovering that as their tenure goes on, surveyors--and Surveyors-General--just start saying stuff. They stop caring about the repercussions, and start to soapbox whenever a subject touches something they're frustrated with. To a certain degree I knew about this, but until I got into the unfiltered draft correspondence, I didn't realize the sheer scale of the rants involved. A professional opinion that might be one paragraph, stretching to thirty, with digressions into disempowerment, struggles with unqualified persons, and professional quarrels with local magistrates and councils? Oh hell yes, those things are very fun to read.

What are the must read books about the American revolution published within the last five years? What are the current arguments being discussed by historians who study the era?

I came accross an interesting find at a local book shop: a 'History and Computing' book which is essentially a series of early papers doing things like analysing Domesday records, performing records linkage on a number of old documents, doing spatial analyses of archaeological sites in Greece, etc. I've only skimmed it so far, but it seems like an interesting index into several areas that have later become far more developed.

Particularly intriguing is the age of the book itself -- in computing terms. In those cases where the work was not carried out on a university mainframe(!), the BBC Micro was referenced. Perhaps there are some commentors here that have fond memories.

For anyone interested in Soviet history, check out this article by Anne Applebaum about a new Stalin biography that seems more convincing than recent work, e.g. by Jörg Baberowski.

Also, for those of you who read German, the latest APuZ had a good article on the world-view of historians that is worth checking out.

I'm currently taking a class on the Vietnam war as part of my masters. My intent is to research espionage during the war as part of my main paper for the class. Does someone have book recommendations when it comes to this topic? I know it's broad and I made it this way on purpose so that once I start reading more I narrow down the subject matter significantly.

I've been reading a lot of Annales history lately, particularly Braudel and Lefebvre. I find them very compelling as an anthropologist because they take a very anthropological approach to their subjects.

That said, what are some of the most salient critiques of either these authors individually or Annales school as a whole? Books, articles, just your ramblings are all welcome. Archaeologists have a bad habit of poaching from other disciplines without taking the criticisms along with the methods and theory and I'd like to avoid that.