Just finished up the semester, and I'm planning on heading off to the library for some reading outside of my field of study. Feels great to have finished everything! Anyone have any recommendations on European politics post-Napoleon and before the 1870s? Hope everyone's having a nice holiday season

looking for book recs if you guys don't mind:

I'm working on my thesis currently in philosophical value theory and political philosophy. My larger topic is fairly labor intensive to explain, but it has to do with resituating Marxist false consciousness in a modern theory of non natural value properties. Ultimately I'm arguing that Marxist false conciosuness amounts to a misinterpretation of the demands objective value properties put on the individual, in a very specific way.

Word vomit over. I'm using some empirical case studies, one of which is Meinhof and her involvement in the RAF. Most of work with her is primary writings she did for kronket. I have a deep personal interest in the RAF and the radikalstudentinnen history, but I'm looking for some primary sources that deal more with the general political climate in West Germany and the role student activists played in shaping it. Also anything that relies heavily on primary source material about the RAFs actions or their relationship to the broader student movements across the world (SPS, Weather Underground, etc) would be awesome. If you know of anything I'd appreciate it!

I've just started two books:

• The Coming of the Third Reich (Richard J Evans)
• Empire of Humanity - A History of Humanitarianism (Michael Barnett)

Opinions on the usefulness of either are welcome. I'm trying to get an overview of the interwar period, specifically Germany as well as an overview of the rise of humanitarianism (Red Cross, WILPF etc).

I've just started Anne Curry's Great Battles Series: Agincourt but I'm only just through the Introduction so I can't give any impressions of it so far. I attended a talk she gave that covered a lot of the same stuff as the book and it was really interesting, so I'm hopeful that this book will be a good read.

I've been doing a lot of travel of late which, for all its stresses, has allowed me to catch up on my book list. Recently it gave me the opportunity to dive into Kanchan Chandra's Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics, in an effort to broaden my reading beyond dead Russians.

Unfortunately this is one of the most vexing works I've read in a long time. The first half of the book deals with some very interesting conceptions of ethnicity: how it can be defined and broken down into component parts. The framework is interesting - providing a strong challenge to the idea of unchanging ethnic identities that are so often encountered in history - and I can definitely see myself using it in future.

However the work badly needs some slash-and-burn editing. The key principles are presented in a hefty (50 page) introduction and then repeatedly restated with slightly more complexity over the following 150. I counted some key terms defined, often with the exact same formulations, at least 3-4 times. With some competent editing/writing the first several chapters could easily have been halved.

The remainder of the book looks at using combinatorial mathematics to model the behaviour of ethnic identities/categories. This is considerably more niche and, while I have a background in such mathematics, my patience had been drained by the stodgy first half of the book.

So some interesting ideas but unless you have a particular interest in modelling ethnic change then I'd look for summaries elsewhere.

Been plowing through The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath by Robert Pierce Forbes. It's really good, though I know there's some discontent about him pushing the era of sectional strife back to then. His argument that James Monroe was a political ninja who didn't leave behind much of a paper trail seems a little circumstantial. Also hard to follow, so I'll be rereading that chapter at least.

Forbes' identification of historical figures as antislavery is also very generous, something I'm a bit more attentive towards since I got through with Sean Wilentz. Specifically, he's willing to grant the title to John Randolph on the grounds that Randolph made arrangements to free his slaves after his death. Good for him, but even as Forbes tells you that, he's telling you about how Randolph was utterly dedicated to keeping the federal government's potentially emancipating hands off the institution. The second count is more than implicitly or functionally proslavery, it's so proslavery that if it doesn't qualify then I don't know what does. Randolph may have wanted his own hands clean, and good for him if he did, but he also devoted himself to work that he understood as preserving and defending slavery. I admit that I'm pretty hard on slavery's defenders, but I don't think you have to be unfair to weigh the latter as more indicative of one's priorities than the former.

You can make the argument, I suppose, but at least so far he's often described Randolph as antislavery and usually not included the qualifiers. Maybe he means to suggest that Randolph took a hard right turn circa 1820, but I'm fairly sure he's described the guy as pretty consistent across his career to date. Maybe it works in the context of the Virginia aristocracy, but it's odd to adopt that frame without calling it out.

Random amusements: Forbes cites William W. Freehling fairly often and I've read him both recently and extensively enough (Nullification, both Road to Disunion volumes, planning on more) that I often recognize the citations as him without checking the footnotes. Each time I feel like I leveled up a little bit.

It's mostly in the footnotes, but Forbes isn't above taking serious swipes at Andrew Jackson's over-enthusiastic fandom. Having just read Wilentz, I find this delightful.

It's nice to see Calhoun in his full-bore nationalist phase again after so many examinations of Mr. States Rights. My favorite bit so far is where he declares the Constitution as a fairly practical document, not one from which one ought to go to derive logical abstractions like he would spend the back half of his career doing nonstop.

I've been reading Karl Taube's 2004 article Flower Mountain: Concepts of Life, Beauty, and Paradise among the Classic Maya. This article, plus some ethnographic evidence from modern-day Huichol people, is leading me to believe that the guachimontones of West Mexico may be an expression of this Flower Mountain concept that Taube discusses for the Classic Maya.

I've been reading the fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption's The Hundred Years' War series and I'm a bit more than half-way through. What I found the most fascinating in the whole series was probably the Burgundian-Armagnac struggles and while I do think Sumption explains the causes of the breach between the two parties and the consequences of the breach very well, I still feel like there's more to read, more view points to be heard and more things to consider. Any recommendations on further reading on the Burgundian-Armagnac feud (hopefully also including the parts leading up to the parties forming, the power struggle between Louis of Orléans and Philip the Bold)?