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!
Cooper's Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 was so good I burned through it over the weekend. I realized about three chapters in that it's just the book I've been looking for for years: a relatively high-level summary of southern politics for the full antebellum. I got that from Freehling's Road to Disunion too, and those are great books, but Cooper is much more approachable. The main issues I had were that he's a little bit textbooky (minimal citations, fairly breezy) and that the book felt heavily weighted toward the early republic. The argument's very sound, though. I can see why it's what everyone cites.
I was excited enough that I wanted to see what else Cooper had out, ideally recently. Found out he's gone to seed. Badly. It's cringe-inducing enough when blundering generation types, which Cooper did not seem to be at all in Liberty and Slavery imply that emancipating four million slaves wasn't worth the lives of considerably fewer mostly white people. Going the next step and saying it outright is just stunning. Not going to bother with that one. Cooper did write another book back in the late Seventies I'll probably still get around to, though.
Then I crash-landed on Finkelman's Dred Scott vs. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents. It's fine, but nothing at all like I wanted and I just kept thinking that I know of two other books that probably meet my needs much better. It's meant as a light reading to supplement classes, so I can't blame it for being what it aspires to be. That's just not what I wanted. I dropped it about twenty pages into the documents.
Which brings me to Adam Rothman's Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. I'd have liked him to have included Georgia and South Carolina, but Rothman largely limits himself to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The first chapter felt a bit diffuse, but it's since firmed up into a really solid book. The fifty page chapters are a little punishing to my chapter-a-day reading schedule, but I've done worse. Almost finished now. Then it's probably Johnson's River of Dark Dreams, but I might pick something lighter or a more direct slavery study.
In related news, I haven't read fiction since January 10. Suspect I'm unlikely to get back to it this year.
Anybody got any recommendations for books on the history of UAW, or labor in Detroit in general? (Layman here.)
Any recommendations of unbiased books for the 3 Indian-Pakistan Wars?