Hello everybody,

Some of you may have seen my posts on /r/Judaism and /r/JewishHistory. Now' I'm trying my luck here. I'm asking for your assistance. I'm currently working on my MA thesis on Jewish (long distance) travel experience in the early 20th century, and I'm still looking for sources. I want to center my work around self-narratives like (travel) diaries and memoirs, as well as correspondence. I already have some sources (I'll say a few words about them at the end of this post) but am still looking for more material. My focus lies on the time before 1933. So far I have worked with the collections of the Leo Baeck Institute and have searched via the Center for Jewish History's search engine.

If you are aware of any material (in English or German would be best) that could be of use to me, I would be eternally grateful for any assistance! Thanks in advance!

Now as promised, a few words about my 4 main sources so far:

Florence Marx Ross, born in Chicago in 1894 to German immigrants, travels to Europe in July 1913 to visit relatives of her parents in Germany and Belgium as well as to learn French and improve her German. She spends most of her time in Brussels and Charleroi, Belgium, but also several weeks in Germany (Heilbronn and Berlin). She witnesses the outbreak of World War I in Belgium and almost dies (have a look! (I uploaded her entry from August 22nd, 1914, the day the Germans took Charleroi and nearly killed her) during the so-called Rape of Belgium. Florence managed to return to the US in October 1914 and lived on till the 1980s. If you're interested, I managed to obtain a lot of information about her and her family via census records and the like. The collection consists of her diary which she kept daily, as well as most of the letters she sent to her parents in Chicago. I've transcribed all of the diary and every letter, between 80.000 and 90.000 words. It's almost completely in English.

Julius & Margarete Goldstein went to the US for a lecture trip in 1923/24. They traveled to various cities (New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinetti, St. Louis, and many more) and gave lectures. Julius, a philosopher, about Race, Antisemitism, Nietzsche and other topics. Margarete on topics like "Jewish Women/Children in Germany". They kept a diary of their trip which was mainly written by Margarete, with several entries by Julius. I've transcribed all of her entries, about 12.000 words. The collection as a whole consists of several diaries, correspondence, lectures, papers, and much more. Just have a look at the link above if you're interested. The collection is mostly in German.

Ismar Elbogen was a German rabbi and scholar, especially know for his works on Jewish Liturgy. Accompanied by Felix Perles, a rabbi from Königsberg and zionist he traveled to the US in 1922/23 to teach at the Jewish Institute of Religion in NY. He travels to Cincinnati, Baltimore, Chicago and other cities. Elbogen and the Goldsteins are visiting the US almost back-to-back and are meeting some of the same people. It's interesting how their opinions of these people diverge. Elbogen really admired Stephen Wise, the founder of the Jewish Institute of Religion, while Margarete Goldstein did not like him very much. So far I have transcribed all of his diary, which unfortunately stops in January 1923, before he departs the US, ~12.000 words. I'm still working on his correspondence with his wife, I hope it continues until the end of his stay. The diary is in German.

Hulda Freudenthal Thurman was born in Germany around 1871. She left Germany for the US at age 17 and married a Philip Thurman in Ohio. He was originally from Vienna. I'm assuming it was a mediated marriage but I have no conclusive proof. She visited her siblings in Germany from May to October 1930 and kept a daily diary. There's nothing special to note about this diary. Hulda was a normal woman. Her brother (German Wikipedia) was a somewhat important German Rabbi of Reform Judaism. It's moving that she states several times that this visit would be the last time she saw any of her siblings.

If you want to know more about anything I'm doing, please feel free to ask! I'll answer every question to the best of my knowledge. Unfortunately I have to work from 5 Minutes ago to 10pm German time today, which should be 8am to 4pm Eastern Time. So I won't be able to reply until then. Thanks again!

A really interesting article by Matthew Liebermann and colleagues came out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Native American depopulation, reforestation, and fire regimes in the Southwest United States, 1492-1900 CE”. Special thanks to /u/RioAbajo and /u/Mictlantecuhtli who both forwarded me this article within a day of publication. I love having nerd friends.

I thought I would sum up the article here for general information and discussion here. As background, the relative impact and timing of Native American population decline after contact has been the subject of tremendous debate. Theories range from those of the “high counters”, like Dobyns, who believe the Americas were richly inhabited before contact, but faced early catastrophic population decline from introduced infectious organisms right in the 16th century, to those who hold a more nuanced version of gradual demographic decline within each region based on a combination of factors, including infectious disease spread.

The population debate encompasses evidence from a wide variety of sources, uniting archaeology, cultural anthropology, history, ethnohistory, linguistics, genetic anthropology, and biological anthropology to try to understand the processes operating in Native American populations after contact. The great contribution of this paper is the integration of archaeology and history with emerging ecological data on the rate of reforestation and the change in fire patterns for one small region, the Jemez Province of New Mexico, for one specific time.

The authors proposed four competing hypotheses: (1) large-scale depopulation occurred before direction Pueblo-European contact as a result of pandemic disease spread from central Mexico in the 1520s-1530s (Dobyns hypothesis); (2) the largest losses occurred from 1541 to 1598, between first direct contacts and the establishment of permanent colonial settlements (contact hypothesis); (3) population decline occurred during the early colonial period (1598-1680), after the establishment of missions and sustained daily interactions between Puebloans and Spaniards (the mission hypothesis); (4) no large scale population changes occurred before 1680 (null hypothesis).

Based on their population data the authors propose 5,000-8,000 people lived in the Jemez Province region at the turn of the 16th century. That population needed ready access to wood for buildings and fires, and when the population decreased the rates of spreading surface fires should increase, as well as new growth of trees. A full discussion of the ecological data is beyond my scope of expertise, perhaps one of our environmental historians can comment on the methods and theory, so I’ll jump to the conclusions.

Archaeological, historical, and dendrochronological data from the Jemez Province combine to paint a picture of demographic stability at large Pueblo villages between 1492 and 1620, with drastic declines in the subsequent decades. This finding supports the third of our working hypotheses, the mission hypothesis, and refutes the Dobyns, contact, and null hypotheses. Archaeological and historical records attest to demographic stability across the pre-Hispanic/early contact period (1480-1620). Widespread depopulation at large village sites began between 1620 and 1640, following the establishment of Franciscan missions in the region. Historical records suggest that a deadly combination of pestilence, warfare, and famine initiated the depopulation of large Jemez villages…

Within North America, the data from the Jemez Province add to a growing body of archaeological evidence attesting to the variegated nature of post-Columbian indigenous population decline. The timing and severity of depopulation events varied across the continent. Archaeological evidence fails to support the notion that sweeping pandemics uniformly depopulated North America.

Lingering Questions

One difficulty with the study is the inability to interpret depopulation from disease, warfare, famine, etc from migration out of the province in the wake of mission establishment. We know the number of people declined, and here I need to phone a friend like the ones who sent me this article, or /u/AlotofReading, to place this pattern in the context of the larger historical and regional cycle of geographic mobility to escape resource scarcity or increased warfare. Does this pattern just reflect excess mortality, or could the population have moved, or is there likely a combination of both factors?

Next, as one historian of the Spanish Empire in the New World remarked, the Spanish presence in North America was the tail of the dog. Jemez Province would have been on the northern edge of a vast empire. Supplies to New Mexico needed to traverse the long journey from Mexico via the Camino Real, and the journey was so long missions were only re-supplied once every three years. The remote location might have buffered New Mexico from waves of epidemic disease in ways that are not transferable to other portions of the continent. The authors do specifically argue against generalizing the results, and I would reinforce the need to examine each geographic area independently.

Okay, nerd out.

Josette Elayi recently published a review of Father J. Brian Peckham's posthumously-published Phoenicia: Episodes and Anecdotes from the Ancient Mediterranean (Winona: Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014) in the Review of Biblical Literature (link). For the most part, I agree with Elayi's assessments. One comment in particular hits the mark:

Peckham's approach is sometimes subjective, literary, and unscientific, as when he writes: "Phoenicia was a Mediterranean state of mind. ... The Phoenicians inspired because they were smart, secular, and secure" (559).

While I would avoid using the terms "scientific" or "unscientific" to describe historical inquiry, Peckham's assertions do suggest a failure to apply proper methodology. This problem unfortunately manifests itself all throughout his book. To quote another controvertible statement: "[The Phoenicians] went [west] because the East was getting to be too small and divided, too exlusive and precarious, too dangerous, and not sufficiently profitable. At last, it was just a place where they lived until they were Africanized and Europeanized and enrolled in another cycle of national awakening" (291). Here and elsewhere, Peckham seems to evoke the language and imagination of a different era of scholarship.

His approach to the evidence proves equally haphazard. For instance, as Elayi has already noted, Peckham presents a Tyrian king-list on p. 463 in which he substitutes an interim period of "judges" (i.e., magistrates) with a seemingly fictional "Baalyatar." Inexplicably, Peckham cites not the primary source (Josephus Against Apion 1.156-9) but rather an article by André Lemaire---who also never mentions Baalyatar.^1 How did this happen? A few pages later, on p. 467, Peckham quotes a fragmentary, third-century inscription from Tyre (RES 1204) recording a donation from "Adonibaal the judge."^2 Peckham concludes that Adonibaal must have belonged to a Carthaginian embassy, since the office of the "judge" only existed in the Western Mediterranean. In fact, the inscription alone does not yield enough information to extrapolate such a context. It would appear that Peckham arbitrarily removed the judges from the Tyrian king-list in order to justify his interpretation of RES 1204.

A more egregious claim appears on p. 90, where Peckham attributes the "seal of Jezebel"---an unprovenanced seal bearing the name yzbl in Phoenician---to the biblical Jezebel, daughter of king Ethbaal (Ithobaal I) of Tyre-Sidon and the wife of king Ahab of Israel.^3 But Peckham offers little justification beyond his assumption that the seal's iconography "suits [Jezebel's] reputation"; nor does he refer to the scholars who had earlier argued for this identification in greater detail.^4 Once again, the available evidence does not actually allow for any definitive conclusions about the seal's owner. (It may very well date to the eighth century, whereas the biblical Jezebel died around 841.)^5

I could list a myriad more examples.

Regrettably, Peckham passed away in October 2008 before he had the opportunity to revise his work and perhaps take advantage of the latest archaeological data (especially from Carthage and Huelva).^6 Despite the above criticisms, Phoenicia does contain a wealth of knowledge and insight that experts will surely find stimulating. Peckham deserves praise for attempting to integrate, translate, and analyze more Phoenician inscriptions than any other study, which reflects his distinguished career as an epigraphist. Lay readers must still remain cautious, however. As Elayi concludes: "the historical conclusions drawn by the author are often biased and should be carefully checked before being adopted."

Footnotes:

^1 André Lemaire, "Inscription royale phénicienne sur bateau votif," in Teshûrôt LaAvishur: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East in Hebrew and Semitic Languages, ed. Michael Heltzer and Meir Malul (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Centre Publications, 2004), 117*-29*. For recent observations on the accuracy of Josephus' Tyrian king-list, see Hanspeter Schaudig, "A Tanit-Sign from Babylon and the Conquest of Tyre by Nebuchadrezzar II," Ugarit-Forschungen 40 (2008): 533-45, esp. 537-43.

^2 On RES 1204, cf. also Javier Teixidor, "Les fonctions de rab et de suffète en Phénicie," Semitica 29 (1979): 9-14, esp. 10-2.

^3 For the seal, see N. Avigad, "The Seal of Jezebel," Israel Exploration Journal 14, no. 4 (1964): 274-6.

^4 See Hennie J. Marsman, Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social and Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 655f.; Marjo C. A. Korpel, "Seal of Jezebel and Other Women in Authority," Journal for Semitics 14, no. 2 (2006): 349-71, esp. 358-62; idem., "Queen Jezebel's Seal," Ugarit-Forschungen 38 (2006): 379-98.

^5 See Christopher A. Rollston, "Prosopography and the יזבל Seal" Israel Exploration Journal 59 (2009): 86-91. For other comments, see here.

^6 See e.g. Albert J. Nijboer, "A Phoenician Family Tomb, Lefkandi, Huelva, and the Tenth Century BC in the Mediterranean," in Beyond the Homeland: Markers in Phoenician Chronology, ed. Claudia Sagona (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 297-306; R. F. Docter et al., "New Radiocarbon Dates from Carthage: Bridging the Gap between History and Archaeology?," in the same volume, 379-422; Fernando González de Canales et al., "The Emporium of Huelva and Phoenician Chronology: Present and Future Possibilities," in the same volume, 631-52.

Hello! For my historical materials class I need to find 15-20 pages worth of primary sources from a war in the 20th century that hasn't been annotated already (that's my job!). I was hoping to find an interview, personal narrative or correspondence from the Siege of Leningrad. I will be spending next semester in Petersburg so I would like to learn about the city during the war. I'm also open to documents from the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Can someone suggests books that might contain such primary sources? Or any online databases/archives? Thanks for the help!

Reading: (1) American Nursing: A History of Knowledge, Authority, and the Meaning of Work by Patricia D'Antonio, and (2) parts of Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History by Catherine Ceniza Choy. The latter uses a transnational framework and argues that Filipino nurse migration is linked to American imperialism in the islands, as well as to efforts in the Philippines that encouraged migration.

On the queue is The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed, which won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Lately have been interested in narrative history! Gordon-Reed talks about some of the strengths of using storytelling techniques at a panel from the 2013 AHA annual meeting. Here's the video: 2013 Annual Meeting: Session 138: Clio's Craft: History and Storytelling. One is that evocative storytelling about an African American family would be more likely to reach a broader and majority-White audience. In the panel, Karl Jacoby from Columbia also raises the question of the role of aesthetics in history.

Does somebody have a book called: Cogs, Caravels and Galleons: The Sailing Ship, 1000-1650 by Richard W. Unger, part of the History of the Ship book series?

Can someone give me some quick review of it? Is it thorough enough? Does it have a lot of technical information? Any worthy images of reconstructions, cross-sections, and such visualisations?

I am mostly interested about the carrack and caravel.

The book isn't really available, especially where I am.I would have to order it through from a used book seller, and with shipping it is very expensive for me. So I would like to be sure it is worth it

Just started Stephen Howe's Empire: A Very Short Introduction to hopefully gain a better understanding of the semantic and theoretical aspects of the historiography of empire. I'm hoping at some point to use a trans-imperial approach to Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman military history so I figured I should brush up on my terminology and definitions.

Thoughts on The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis? It gets mentioned here so often I thought I'd check it out, but the reason I'm posting is that I'm wondering if it would be an appropriate choice for a Book Club, i.e. is it an engrossing enough narrative that would be fun/interesting for people who aren't specifically interested in history? There are a few info-geeks in the group, but also some who aren't really up for highly technical or dry reading.

I have a terrible track-record in the book club for picking things that I think sound interesting but everyone else hates, so thought it would be good to ask around before I inflict another horror on the gang.

Thanks!

I'm trying to look at the similarities between Roman and American propaganda, and so far I've gotten access to A Companion to the Roman Army. But, I'd like to expand my project beyond the military impact of it. Anything would be useful especially for the Roman side; but good sources for the American aspect are welcome. Thanks in advance!

Looking to find resources to learn more about the life of Vestal Virgins. Got a few suggestions from /r/SuggestMeABook but nothing that seemed very scholarly. Suggestions?

Started Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. Very powerful opening pages, complete with the sort of delightful arch observation that usually gets a smile from me. Then I got lost. (I'm about a quarter of the way through now.) Sat down to write a bit of a complaint about his presentation, which commences with a sort of intellectual history approach but then derails into a history of Virginia, but in the course of writing that I realized what he was about. It's a subtle way to present a thesis, focusing on the English colonists' lacks and shortcomings as a way to highlight the transformation ahead of them. I'm just used to more declarative styles. Also might have been reading it later than advisable. And a bit dense.