Today:
Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.
So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!
I have been recently binging on everything Hellenistic Era but especially Ptolemaic Egypt.
Does anyone have any good recommendations on architecture in Ptolemiac Egypt? Because I am building a recreation of Alexandria around the time of Cleopatra VII (so I can include the Caesareum and later versions of the various temples), it is a monumental task and I could always use more reference.
This week I read the relatively short Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400- 1700 by Caro Cipolla. Overall the book was...a little disappointing. Now, the book was first published in the early '60s and it's only 150 pages or so long so it was never exactly going to be a mind blowing read, but it doesn't really live up to its title. The book title suggests a sweeping history of naval and military technology during a period when both were undergoing substantial development and had a significant impact on the course of history. Instead...it's basically a history of artillery, mostly field artillery. The dates at least are fairly accurate. This was disappointing to me because I had got the book primarily interested in the naval side of things (the sails promised in the title are never discussed) since I'm already pretty familiar with early gunpowder history.
It's a pretty engaging read, to be fair, and it feels like it was probably a pretty substantial work when it first came out. Unfortunately, the history of guns has developed quite a bit since it was first published. It's also at times a tad-Eurocentric and a little too keen to praise England, but only slightly.
I'm not disappointed I read it, and the author has a good grasp on primary source material so his bibliography and references could be worth mining in the future, but I wouldn't recommend anyone seek out a copy either. For now I'm starting a much longer work: Peter Wilson's The Thirty Year's War: Europe's Tragedy.
I recently found out about the "Half Moon Camp" program in WWI, where the Germans tried to take Muslim POWs and convince them to wage jihad as double agents.
Has anyone read anything good on this in English? Unfortunately all the references in that wikipedia article are in German.