I'm interested in the building of a "defeated" society, and that mindset of a culture of defeat. I first got interested during a German history seminar, and picked up Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider", which I really enjoyed.

I'm looking for other books exploring these themes. I've seen recommended online "The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Can anybody recommend this one, or another better source?

I tripped over a ruckus created by two Victorian egos! Basically, a local division commissioner and the Surveyor General were engaged with the very difficult land matters in the King William's Town division--where land records were confused, title issue and recording were difficult things, and even today it's kind of a mess. Basically each blamed the other for the condition, or so each imagined it, but the marginalia suggest there was some blame being lobbed around. Ultimately nothing gets resolved, everyone pretends nothing is wrong, and the ball gets kicked down the field. One example:

[Civil Commissioner, King William's Town, to Surveyor General, 8 Dec 1881, enclosure to SG to Commissioner of Crown Lands, 18 Jan 1882, No. 14, LND 1/131, Western Cape Archives Depot, Cape Town (South Africa).]

K[ing ]W[illiam's ]Town, 8 Dec. 1881

Sir.

I have the honour to acknowlede the receipt of your letter of 28th ulto., and in reference to the lat paragraph of it, the object of which is to me unintelligible and which could only have been dictated by a spirit of sarcasm, I can only express my regret that you did not confine yourself simply to giving the required information.

Whatever the state of Land Matters in this Division may be; I am perfectly willing to leave it to the Hons. the Premier and Commissioner of Crown Lands (who had a slight insight into them during their late short visit here) to say whether or not they are in an "unsatisfactory and unbusinesslike" contition; and in whatever condition they may be in I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am not in the slightest degree responsible or to blame for such.

And if my efforts to put arrear matters right in the offices here are met with sarcasm, it is very easy for me to discontinue such efforts.

I have the honour to be,

Sir,

Your obedient Servant.

W.B.Chalmers C.C.

...and it just goes downhill from there, until finally it gets referred to the Commissioner of Crown Lands who has to pull rank.

What are the recommended books on the Arab Revolt and WWI aviation? The book list doesn't have anything on those subtopics. I'm currently reading "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" but, while interesting, I'm finding Lawrence neither an effective nor dispassionate writer.

Anything on NACA and/or pre Space Race American aeronautics tests and experiments?

I stumbled across a large collection of interviews on NASA's website. Interviewees include many of the Space Race astronauts; it's a fun time-suck.

Just finished Richard E. Ellis' The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights, and the Nullification Crisis, which I think completes my survey of the modern, book-length treatments of the affair. All two of them.

I feel like he overcorrected a bit from the natural tendency to make the story all about Those Crazy South Carolinians. It came off almost completely as an abstract discussion of constitutional theory, with little interest in just where SC's nullification ideas, and the criticisms of them, came from until the very end. What's there seems fine, but I'd have liked more. In a way, he feels like the opposite extreme from William W. Freehling. Freehling always has a biographical sketch on hand, probably far more than he needs to, but I don't remember Ellis using a one. They both agree on the centrality of slavery to the nullifiers' cause, but Freehling puts it right up on center stage and Ellis confines it to a single section of his last chapter. I checked the index just now to be sure. No reason he needs to be interested in the same things I'm interested in, of course. It just struck me as odd choice in a book seems fundamentally concerned with a major change in states' rights thought.

I'm reading Storm of Spears by Matthew. I should finish it today. It looks at how hoplites battles were fought from the individual to the phalanx.
Some of his arguments are convincing but overall he seems to base a lot of what he says on his previous conclusions. I don't know that he has presented enough data for us to conclude that the underarm stance for holding the hoplite spear was how it was done.
Then he bases some of how the phalanx fought on the fact that the spear was held underarm. It has given me a lot to think about on a subject that I thought I understood very well. There are places in the literature where the literal othismos argument does not hold up very well or has to have anomalies explained away.

Still I'm not convinced completely by his arguments. It could use more on how big the sample sizes were for the experiments. I would think you would need at least 25-50 people on each side to get any kind of idea about how it would all work together.

I am recently realizing how woefully ignorant I am of Rome and the Roman Empire. Im specifically interested in the political career of Marcus Aurelius and what happened immediately before and after his prominence.

So far just getting to know the man, reading Meditations. But look forward to reading historical accounts to put his words into a better understood context.

Maybe this is the place for this general question. I feel completely ignorant of history. It's really a daunting thing to think about getting caught up. Rather than merely as for reading recommendation, I'm wondering if any of you can say a little about the process of coming to have a picture of history in my mind.

Can anybody recommend a good book that discusses religiosity and disbelief in Europe/"The West" for the last 200 years?

My dad is a historian and he's really interested in the Chuvash people. Can anyone recommend a book that he might like?