Finished up Foner's Reconstruction about a day ahead of schedule. I feel like I've been used hard and put away wet. It's great, but dense and considerably drier than I expected from reading other work of his.

It also reads very much like a book written in the Eighties by a historian trained in the consensus era. Foner's much more attuned to conflict than they were, which is part of what made it odd. Conflict to Foner mostly seems to mean political fighting, not political violence. He doesn't short the latter exactly, but with the exception of the section on the Klan violence comes up largely in passing. Black officeholders, for example, have it hard because of various forms of ordinary political hostility, a lack of resources, crop failures, and then violence comes in at the end. Major riots pass in a paragraph or two despite having big effects on unfolding policy. He's not neglecting them, but the emphasis is well away.

This isn't how Foner presented it in his lectures as of a few years ago, but we all live post-9/11 now. I wonder how he framed things in the Eighties and early Nineties. The earliest CSPAN had was 97, by which point I suspect he'd have other domestic terrorism in mind from what I recall of the zeitgeist.

Read Victoria Byerly's Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls in about two days (thankfully - I was afraid it would take me much longer); it's a fantastic oral history compilation of interviews with working class southern women, primarily mill workers. I felt like I was listening to my grandmother despite her vastly different background - it felt so intimate and rang so true in tone. Read more of Bederman's Manliness and Civilization for my own research, and found something really interesting....wrote a couple pages on it only for my advisor to tell me that the section I incorporated it into is extraneous (he's right...but it was painful nonetheless).

I'm reading Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Carlos Eire. I'm really enjoying it but my prior knowledge of the Reformation was limited to European History survey courses. Would any Reformation or Early Modern Europe specialists care to chime in on it?

https://www.amazon.com/Reformations-Early-Modern-World-1450-1650/dp/0300111924

I'm poking at databases in which to record the reading and research I'm using for reference, as my previous method of a great big Google doc containing lists of books and papers is becoming unwieldy. I'm trying Zotero first, and it seems to meet the immediate need, and has what appears to be reasonable tagging.

Has anyone any dire warnings about it, or recommendations for something more useful to use?