I just ran into some pretty serious and apparently thorough research that seems to reveal a major autodidact Cuban historian as a charlatan who cites obscure documents to prove outlandish theories in the hope that no one checks the original sources (or that foreigners can't even access them). Since I haven't confirmed the allegations myself, I will refrain from publishing his name and info, and thus needlessly dirtying his name, but if true... I'm kind of in shock.

Just finished a Book over Tokugawa Ieyasu, "Shogun: The life of Tokugawa Ieyasu" By A.L.Sadler from Tuttle Publisher. Honestly it was a excellent read to begin the study over this huge figure in Japanese history. I recently begun this search while I was working on Mainland Japan. Stumbled across this book (being translated into English) while I was there. Huge find. They have other publications in their respected fields also "History of Japan" by Mason/Caiger and same publishing group Tuttle. So for anyone looking for some great books to start any Japanese Historical readings I would highly recommend these two.

In between work I've been doing some light reading on the development of modern political Islam (Shi'a and Sunni). I was able to attend a lecture about the Shi'a side where the speaker recommended books for further reading (I don't remember them off hand, I wrote them down somewhere though) but I am interested in books or lectures for Sunni Islam as well.

About two-thirds of the way through Don Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic, which is a survey of the (US) federal government's involvement with slavery. He died before finishing it and the guy who finished seems to have studied very hard to make his prose as dry as possible. I almost gave it up just reading his introduction, but Fehrenbacher's own writing is much closer to the standard level of dryness.

It's...ok. Fehrenbacher's writing is pretty clear and he stresses his arguments well enough that you don't get lost halfway through a long chapter. But he chose to do thematic chapters rather than strictly chronological. That's sensible enough, but it means that the cross-currents between related issues tend to fade away. Now and then he brings them back, but it's usually a one sentence "and this was also happening" sort of reference.

I've picked up a lot about the efforts to limit the international slave trade in particular, including what he considers a major revision of estimates on the extent of illegal importation, but I don't know enough about the older estimates or subsequent historiography to say if he's got the right of it or not. The short version is that he thinks everyone badly overcounted, largely because they followed Du Bois in taking period rhetoric at face value. But he allows that his own estimate might be low because it's not like people routinely advertised their participation in a trade that could actually put them on the end of a rope.

But those chapters are over now and it's back to familiar turf: fugitive slaves and slavery in the territories.