I've just received my copy of Pieter Judson's new survey of late Habsburg history, The Habsburg Empire: A New History. The work just came out at the end of April and is strongly revisionist, as the title implies. I've only gotten through the introduction so far, but Judson is essentially trying to get at what "the empire" meant to its citizens. While much of Habsburg history prior to the past decade or so has focused on telling the story of fragmented nations in competition with each other, resulting in highly segmented "national histories," I get the hunch that with this new book, Judson will be focusing on institutions that crossed the traditional ethnolinguistic boundaries typically used by historians. In the introduction, for example, Judson uses the example of the 1911 parliamentary elections to show the widespread fervor and popular participation that the elections prompted, even from among those segments of the population that were disenfranchised (women, children). Trying to revise the idea that the Habsburg monarchy was some sort of "prison of the nations," Judson seems to be arguing that the Monarchy played a large role in the lives of many of its citizens. While he's not the first to suggest such a thesis, I think Judson is the first to publish a large scale survey of Habsburg history with this thesis at its core.

I finally finished Tyerman's How to Plan a Crusade this week. Overall it's a very interesting, if extremely dry, book and in it Tyerman makes a rather interesting argument, which I'll get to in a moment. Overall, the book is in a strange place. The title and cover give the impression of a fun, approachable history of the Crusades, which this is not. In fact, I would argue that this book works best as a reference tool. Each chapter can be read largely independently of the others as they all deal with different aspects of Crusade planning, and as a cover to cover read it is rough going. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a general reader, and you definitely need a decent familiarity with the Crusades in general to follow parts of this book.

That said, as a work of intense scholarship it's a little thin. Tyerman takes a very broad view of the Crusades which means the breadth of the work is impressive, but this comes at the cost of depth. How to Plan a Crusade is an interesting resource, and has some fascinating moments, but it is also not going to be a revolutionary text.

The best part of the work is the central argument that Tyerman is making, which is essentially the entire point of the book. How to Plan a Crusade is a rebuttal of the idea that the Crusades were disorganized movements that ran mostly on enthusiasm and religious fervor. Instead, Tyerman argues that Crusades were meticulously planned and masterpieces of logistics, particularly the later Crusades. To prove his point Tyerman draws on a vast range of sources, easily the most impressive aspect of his book, and covers all aspects of Crusade planning from initial advertising and recruitment up to the equipping and transportation of Crusading armies. The book is almost exclusively focused on Western Europe, the actual logistics of campaigning in the Holy Land are largely ignored, instead Tyerman is looking at the initial stages of planning rather than the end results.

Tyerman succeeds at showing that Crusades were monstrously complex endeavors, requiring a massive amount of coordination, and in showing that Crusaders were aware of this. He shows that things like cost and logistics were very carefully considered, especially from the Third Crusade on, by individuals going on Crusade, although his argument is strongest when it pertains to Kings or leaders of Crusades and weaker when it comes to lesser nobility. While Tyerman shows how difficult a Crusade was to plan, and the herculean efforts put in by famous Crusaders, he is less capable of proving that these endeavors were masterfully planned. By not discussing the role the Holy Land, or the Crusader States, played in Crusades, as well as not really discussing the campaigns themselves, he fails to reconcile the impressive logistical planning of Crusades with their frequently disastrous results. There is also a surprisingly large hole when it comes to discussing the role of the Military Orders in planning Crusades, with only periodic mentions of the banking services of the Knight's Templar.

Overall, though, it is still an impressive book and it includes lots of nice little nuanced details that I appreciated. The discussion of how loans and financing Crusades worked in the 12th and 13th century is particularly interesting.

Elizabeth Wilson. Love Game: A History of Tennis from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

With the French Open starting tomorrow, followed shortly after by Wimbledon and, in August, the US Open, I figured now would be a good time to get into the tennis mood with a book on the history of tennis. As an avid watcher and player of tennis, I've actually been waiting impatiently for close to a year for this book.

Wilson isn't a professional historian, but she has held several academic positions in which she has taught variously on gender studies, fashion, and cultural studies; moreover, the book is published by a prestigious academic press, so I opened this book expecting a fairly academically rigorous history of tennis. Unfortunately, that's not what this book is. I knew this wouldn't be the type of book I was expecting when I reached the author's thesis in the introduction, which claimed that the defining characteristic of tennis throughout its history has been its eroticism. I know I can't do justice to the author's argument because I think it's so preposterous (and an argument completely unsupportable by historical methods), so I'll let Wilson herself explain what she means:

...yet the rhythm of tennis was also erotic. The cleanly struck shots that streamed off the racquet, the ball exploding off the court and the body's leap from gravity and time [what does that even mean?]--these were inspirational. The player pressed with stroke after stroke and built to the final unanswerable shot and this was repeated in game after game, climax and anti-climax building ever higher, all leading to the point of no return. For player and spectator alike the game provided no guaranteed orgasmic moment, no certainty of a win. The game enacted an unpredictable dialectics of desire--and the spectator's desire is focused on the player.

Yikes. One of the positive aspects of this book, though, is that Wilson discards her thesis fairly quickly; while she makes a great deal of tennis' romanticism and eroticism in the introduction and first chapters, the argument disappears by around chapter 4 or 5. I guess it's better to have no thesis than a bad one.

Instead, Wilson writes a series of short chronological chapters with little relation to each other, discussing various themes like tennis and economic class, gender relations, fashion, high society and popular culture yet, strangely, little about the actual sport. We learn a great deal, for instance, about what men and women tennis players wore to the courts in the early 20th century but little about how tennis was played; we learn about the goings-on of tennis high-society on the French Riviera, yet little about how tennis developed as a sports institution. The chapters in this book often come across as a more well-written version of a celebrity gossip magazine (who wore what? who's dating whom?) rather than an academic study of tennis and society.

Some of Wilson's analysis is downright laughable, particularly when analyzing contemporary tennis. Take, for instance, her attempt to relate the rise of Rafael Nadal to the Eurozone crisis (yes, you read that correctly). For those unfamiliar with tennis, Nadal is a current Spanish tennis player who is considered to be one of the all-time greats. His style of play is founded on the idea of outlasting his opponents by running around the court to retrieve every ball the opponent hits while consistently getting the ball back into play. He's essentially the equivalent of playing against a brick wall. Moreover, his style of play is incredibly taxing physically as it requires him to move quickly around the court in what are very often long rallies. Wilson claims that Nadal's playing style represents Europe in the austerity era. As she states, Nadal's self-imposed physical suffering during tennis matches, and Nadal's success because of this, mirrored German beliefs about economic austerity for European countries like Spain and Greece--"suffering purifies. The road through hell, the road through austerity, leads to the heaven of economic recovery." The book is filled with similar examples of Wilson trying incredibly hard (and often unsuccessfully) to relate tennis to broader social, political, and cultural issues.

It's not all bad, though. I agree with Wilson that tennis is unique among the world's sports in its devotion to women's equality. While women were by no means treated equally throughout the entire history of tennis, I think it's fair to say that women tennis players in the last 40 or so years have fared better than in any other sport. Wilson's section on Arthur Ashe and the American civil rights movement are also good, although the topic has been addressed much more comprehensively by several other historians.

To conclude, I see no reason for any one to pick up this book. If you're interested in the history of tennis, there won't be enough of the actual sport to interest you; if you're not interested in tennis, Wilson doesn't do a good enough job of relating the sport to broader social, political, and cultural issues. Moreover, many of her arguments have been made much more effectively by previous historians. Rather than reading through this travesty of a book, if any one would like to gain a better understanding of tennis I suggest David Foster Wallace's String Theory, which isn't a work of history but rather a collection of Wallace's non-fiction essays on tennis.

I spent the last few weeks digging deep into the details of Louis Slotin's 1946 criticality accident (which happened 70 years ago today) for an article that just went up. Interestingly some of the most useful documents I found were deposited in the New York Public Library as part of the development of a play about him in the 1990s. Because it was part of a visual arts collection, it was in their Lincoln Center library which is really quite nice (I may go back there just to work in the future — very pleasant, just to the right of the ballet house.)

Anyway, among other things, I confirmed that the "demon core" in question was not used in Operation Crossroads, which is a nice little contribution to make. It was too radioactively "hot" after the accident, so they scheduled it for the third Crossroads shot (Charlie), which was itself cancelled. A source at Los Alamos confirmed with me that the core in question was just melted down and turn into another core not too long after the accident. Anticlimactic but interesting to know.

I also found some rather unpleasant photographs of Slotin's accident. I have posted the least acutely-ugly ones here. (NSFL) They are in color and not very nice: you have been warned. There were some of him naked, and some of his organs after his death, that were more disturbing/invasive and I did not make copies of those. General Groves, when talking about the deaths of the Japanese, told Congress that radiation sickness was "a very pleasant way to die" — Slotin's experience contradicts this a lot.

I've just finished reading Tim Blanning's biography Frederick the Great and it was both quite informative and surprisingly witty. Blanning's emeritus status means that he can be a bit more irreverent than a younger scholar, but he also commands a wide array of sources on eighteenth-century Prussia and Europe. Although he veers a little too close to psychobiography at points, Blanning does delve into a number of issues on Frederick, including a pretty extensive treatment on the likelihood of his homosexuality (Blanning's opinion, the jury's out and is never coming back, but the overwhelming evidence is in favor of yes) and a reassessment of his military acumen which he did a good deal of embellishment.

Now if only someone would write a biography of Old Fritz's father, Frederick William I, because the last English-language biography was Ergang's 1941 The Potsdam Führer, Frederick William I, father of Prussian militarism whose title showcases the biases of its era.