I really lost the book lottery. Gave up on Stephen Puleo's The Caning last week on the grounds of no footnotes and no journal reviews. Tuesday my copy of Slavery in the South: A State-by-State History came in. It was presented to me as a sort of technical reference, but that was fine. I'm happy to get more granularity in my generalities.

Things went downhill fast. It's a textbook, which was a little disappointing. What's far worse is that the authors (only one of whom seems to have any other publications and neither of whom trumpet anything but this book in their one-line bios) at best didn't take much care with how they wrote. It's very jarring to see a technically correct sentence refer to enslaved people as "minions." A one-time thing I might pass off as poor editing, but it's their second or third most common term for referring to slaves.

The book also seems designed to prevent analysis. Each state is presented almost completely in isolation, in alphabetical order. You don't get much in the way of connection except for very occasional references to immediate neighboring states. There's little to no talk about commonalities or distinctions as such, save that much of the content is just redundant. They give a general summary right up front and then do near copy and paste jobs to fill space in the state entries. When they do add new details in a state entry, particularly about the treatment of slaves, there's no remark on whether something was especially abundant in the state, unique to it, or anything else. You'd think it's got to be something that sets the state apart, but most of the examples sound pretty typical to me and in other contexts they repeat a detail (that baptism didn't free anyone) from the general survey in each state entry. So...I don't know? It reeks of padding, and this is not that long of a book to begin with.

I finally gave up in the Florida chapter, when without any justification in the text they blandly declared that slavery wasn't so bad as in other states. What? I'm willing to believe that it varied place to place; that's not the issue. The thing is they just say that and drop it. There's not even any consideration of how or why; it's just plopped down on the page.

Then later on in the same section there's a line about how Christianity reassured the slaves that they were human. This isn't a comment about slave resistance or slave culture as expressed through religion -they have a few of those that they repeat constantly- but rather presents as a specific claim that slaves were otherwise puzzled about their own natures and needed to pick up some religion from their enslavers to clear things up. At the very least it's a remarkably ill-considered phrasing, but given the "minion" business I'm not much disposed to charity. It's place between two otherwise ordinary sentences about mistreatment of slaves makes it all the more glaring.

There are parts of this book that could be genuinely useful. Nuts and bolts-level detail about when the first slaves came to a jurisdiction and fine-grain details about how slave codes changed over time would make for an excellent topic in a reference work. But as soon as one gets beyond the dates and laws things take a dive.

So enough of that. On /u/sowser 's recommendation from a while back I dug up a copy of James Huston's Calculating the Value of the Union, which is about how property rights ideas informed and shaped slavery debates. I've just started but it's already really good and infinitely more nuanced than usual property rights talk. To Huston, property rights are usually an elitist, hierarchical kind of thing but in a mostly "empty" continent where it seemed land would be infinitely available at scant cost, they have at least an egalitarian, democratic undercurrent.

Huston also locates the South's embrace of the Union as absolutely contingent on its recognition and preservation of property in slaves all the way back at the Constitutional Convention. I've read some of those lines before but usually taken them, following Elizabeth Varon, as exercises in brinksmanship but I've become a bit more confident that they had at least some substance behind them after debates over taxing slave imports and some other really, really early republic arguments in more detail.

I've crossed the halfway point in Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy! Wooo! 425 pages read and we've just about reached 1629, so less than 20 years of war to go! It's still really good, and really intense. It covers so much stuff, it's kind of jaw dropping.

I'm probably going to take a break from it soon, though. I'm going on Holiday at the start of August and I'm not willing to travel with a 1,000 page book, no matter how interesting. I'll just pick it up when I get back.

Ever encounter an off hand comment in an otherwise great read that throws you for a loop? Had that occur while going over RJB Bosworth's The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism. It's a generally good book as it wrestles with a lot of the legacy left by De Felice and Smith in the study of Fascism, while also examining if the 'Great Man' model is actually applicable, or if there is more to be gained in studying the time period through others.

Within the first chapter however he makes an offhand comment that not only raised my eyebrows, but also made me realize just how much of a 'product of its time' this tome was. Stating that Silvio Berlusconi had ridden to power through the use of clever manipulation of history in 1994, but

Berlusconi imagined that he was destined to govern Italy for a considerable period. In fact, unable to manage Bossi and the Lega, his government fell apart after little more than a year, and, by 1998, his political course seemed near its end. [emphasis mine]

As is well known, Berlusconi's course was not at an end and would continue for many, many years after. I have to wonder just how much of that jibe was wishful thinking on the part of Bosworth.

I spent a chunk of last week making friends with Christopher Dyer's Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850-1520, which is very good indeed, and pointed up a few things in food and agricultural history that I didn't know before. It also gave me the answer to why medieval field systems were always long and narrow - it turns out it's an absolute bugger to turn a team of eight oxen around, so you do it as infrequently as possible. I've been looking for an answer to that for some time.

I also read chunks of Eva Svensson's The Medieval Household: Daily Life in Castles and Farmsteads : Scandinavian Examples in Their European Context, which is absolutely excellent. It really digs into the detail of Scandinavian castles and farmsteads, and walks through previous scholarship on the topic in a way that's clear and unambiguous, but presents all the necessary complexity and differences of opinion.

I don't own either book yet, but I intend to resolve that as soon as possible.

In books I do own, I'm currently working my way through Bridget Ann Henisch's The Medieval Cook, which is proving good, and Frantzen's Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England, which is extremely good, marred only by my discovery, a day or two after buying the book, of what a prick the man is. Both of these are courtesy of the IMC bookfair, where I paid about half the normal price for them - and indeed, picked up a second copy of The Medieval Cook for a friend.

Also on the list to acquire in the very near future is Peter Brears' Cooking & Dining in Tudor & Early Stuart England, which I glanced at in the same pile of books as the Dyer and Svensson, and concluded that I didn't need to look further and would just buy my own at the earliest opportunity.

I'm looking for a book recommendation. I want to read the Bible (particularly the Old Testament) from a historian's perspective. Is there something like an annotated Bible, with lots of maps and things, that will walk me through what we know about the various peoples and places mentioned in the Bible? With information about archaeology, which parts we can confirm or can't confirm, etc. I'm picturing something like, the Bible mentions the Hittites, and there's a sidebar saying basically, "Okay so here's what we know about the Hittites..."

So like, a commentary without a theological agenda to push.

Does anyone know of any good books focused on the impact of American bullion on Spain in the late 15th and early 16th centuries?