Finished up Morrison's Slavery and the American West. It's not bad, but got a bit grating at points. The subject is really the collapse of the national Democracy. Whigs and Republicans are barely in the book. Maybe it's just the frame, but Morrison seems to lean fairly blundering generation too. I don't think he goes all the way there, but he's on similar ground. I might also be hyper-vigilant about that.

From there I decided to read Williamjames Hoffer's The Caning of Charles Sumner, the only book on the subject I could find that even had a journal review. It's...not a book for me. It's not bad exactly, though that he only cites quotes is annoying. It's just a very short, breezy overview clearly written to be read in APUSH or an undergrad survey. I don't think I got anything out of it that I couldn't have gotten from just reading the sources.

Hoffer and Morrison both included my first deliberate skimming. I realized a paragraph in that Morrison was just going to rehash free labor. There went a few pages. Hoffer pads his pagecount with an overview of late antebellum sectional crises. There went two chapters.

Moved on to Kaminski's A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution, which I picked up because it's prominent in the footnotes. It's almost all primary sources, many of which are tedious but most of which are mercifully short. Now and then you get a real good one, like a three page letter from some Massachusetts anti-federalists that marks the first time I've found any anti-federalists remotely sympathetic. Naturally it's because they're anti-federalist on the grounds that the constitution is proslavery. I should see if Garrison ever cited them. Also one of them is named Consider Arms, which is great.

I might shift Kaminski to something where I read read a few documents a day and make my primary reading something else to break up the monotony a bit. Aesthetics aside, the worst I can say about it is that the selections seem a little too repetitive. A good section of the New England chapter is just letters written by Moses Brown, which doesn't do much to show scope. Where Kaminski does go for scope, he may overdo it a bit too. The same arguments with much of the same phrasing gets a bit old.

In the queue:

Cooper's Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860. I think that I meant to get The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828-1856 instead, but both are relevant to my interests. Either way, I dug it out of the footnotes.

Finkelman's Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, which got pretty mixed reviews when it came out in the mid-90s but gets favorable citations in more recent work. I suspect it's largely an issue of the academy moving on. A few of the reviews damn him with the faint praise of not bringing up that silly Sally Hemings rumor we all know is totally false, to give you an idea. There were some factual errors and omissions pointed out too, but I have the second edition so hopefully he's fixed that.

Took a trip to the junk store Antique Mall and collected bargain basement copies of Finkelman's Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents and Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. Saw the latter in there about six months ago for ten times what I paid today.

I was currently reading a new article in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory titled “In Praise of Vagueness: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Archaeological Methodology” by Flohr Sørensen. The main argument is that ambiguity and uncertainty are part of a social reality, and as such, rather than perceived them as procedural shortcomings or things to be overcome, social sciences need a methodology capable of embracing the erosion of clarity. Furthermore, the author suggests a new wave of positivist optimism (even a “new empiricism”) based on the use of new advances in science deem to shed light on critical factors, midway between statistical truths and speculation (things like isotopic and DNA analysis, genetics, new radiocarbon dates, remote sensing techniques, computer-aided calculations, biomass spectroscopy, cognitive science projected on to prehistory). I was wondering what are people’s comments on vagueness and ambiguity as strong components of social realities. Also, do people agree that we are experiencing a new wave of positivist thinking in the historical sciences? I would greatly appreciate your comments.

Just recently been starting to read/listen to history books and loving it.

It takes me forever to listen because everytime there's something of interest or importance I type it down into a doc in my drive that I've made for it, but it's so worth it.

I just put The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan on the back burner for a bit and started listening to Alexander the great by Paul Cartledge. Both have been great!

I just finished Collapse by Jared Diamond. How do subject matter experts find his credentials? He doesn't seem to stray too far afield from trappings of geography, but I still take his forays elsewhere with a grain. It's the first book I've read of his; it was certainly very lucid and interesting and fuelled my coffee table chatter for a week (I have morbid friends), so if people think he's as generally trustworthy as any other popular writer who doesn't cite thoroughly (aaaargh) I may pick it up. I'm in linguistics, so can't judge history books effectively...

I was wondering: how are non-English sources usually handled on this sub? I understand that they're generally allowed, but also that they can be pretty impractical. Sure, a source in German or Spanish can probably be understood and checked by at least some other users, but if I base an answer only on a Finnish source (as I probably will at some point) it's likely to be completely useless for the vast majority.

So, is it best to just keep some English alternatives on hand in case someone asks?