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'm just so stoked.
A user from this sub gave me some book recommendations but some were in physical-format only which really sucks since I'm Ecuadorian; it's pretty much impossible for me to get those here.
Thankfully an acquaintance of my family traveled to the US which let me ship the books to her place. I was really worried because there was a chance they would be delivered after she left the US. I'm on a tight budget right now and wasting money is something I can't do.
Instead of risking it all I decided to go for 2 seriously cheap books (1 cent each... wow) that were still on my radar to accompany my main choice. Since it was my only chance to get these kinds of books in a long time I didn't want to waste it.
Having them on my hands really feels amazing. I'm so lucky. I ended up saving a lot of money too! Amazon is great! They're so cheap but somehow still in amazing quality. One of those was last printed 40 years ago! And another costs $130 new!
I didn't actually intended it but it's quite nice that one is about the upper class and other about the lower class. Somehow they compliment each other a bit.
If there's anyone that can comment about these books and give me advice, further reading recommendations, warnings regarding criticisms about them, and more—please do so. It's very much welcomed!
I am still on an Americanization of the Holocaust kick. I am reading The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick.
How do historians deal with corrections to published papers ? Say for example a reader points out a factual error or presents evidence that opens new interpretations, but not enough to warrant a whole new paper. How can you be transparent about accepting modifications while at the same time maintaining tracability regarding who published what when ?
For example on reddit you can edit your posts, the only trace is the date tag and an eventual quote by another user.
Polished off Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone, which I think really ought to count as four books and might have been better done as four. I learned a lot from it, but the combination of four regional narratives and a generational fremework clashed hard for me. They're both very useful, but the way they were organized put them at cross-purposes for me. I'd rather have had the parts be the regions and walked through the generations in each than switched regions with every chapter. Bit odd since usually I very strongly prefer to prioritize chronology as the mode of organization.
From that I've gone off to Elizabeth Pryor Brown's Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters. I don't think I could bear a straight biography of Lee, of whom I am decidedly unfond, but Brown's combination of full-text letters and analysis is great stuff. She gets bonus points for well-earned arch criticism of the Lee legend, though so far I've yet to learn much about Lee's opinion of slavery that I hadn't already picked up through osmosis and my own reading of his famous letter on the subject and that's the lion's share of what I care about the guy for. Still, I'm just tearing through it.
I'm looking for books about the Hitler Youth in combat. Specifically on the eastern front in the closing months. Thanks!
Reading Saving Italy ab the Monuments Men in WWII who saved art and cultural objects from destruction and tracked down some of Hitlers looted art. Problem is this is by the same author who wrote the book Monuments Men and I feel he lifted entire passages from his first book. It's a little known topic but anyone know any books about it that aren't by Robert Edsel? Just doing reading for fun, as an archivist I'm in awe of this men.
Does anyone know of a good atlas of the French Revolutionary+Napoleonic wars? My European geography isn't the best, so campaign level narratives can get confusing.
Got in the new Lovecraft biography, W. Scott Poole's In the Mountains of Madness. It's another of bio designed for a popular audience, but even so...it's pretty rubbish. Poole really didn't have anything new or insightful to say about Lovecraft, and most of the personal opinions and anecdotes he did write were either bizarrely off or just boring and worthless.