I am reading John Waldman's "Hafted Weapons of Medieval and Renaissance Europe". It is an odd book - a book published by Brill and written by an amateur expert (#lifegoals), its details are illuminating and authoritative but the bigger picture it paints is less convincing.

First of all (and this is not surprising coming from an older, non-professional author) the book is -really- dedicated to a very linear and progressive 'infantry revolution' analysis of the developments of late medieval and early modern European warfare - where knights were defeated at Courtrai and Sempach in the early 14th century and then continued to be proven anachronistic dinosaurs while Europe kept them around out of sentimental habit and social snobbery for another two and a half centuries until the Renaissance finally killed them for good. This summary is perhaps unfair to this viewpoint, but only just. So this means that all the wonderful details about polearm construction, manufacture and the development of the physical forms of the weapons is placed in a large context that is grossly oversimplified and not (to my knowledge) supported by the latest scholarship.

Within his analysis, Waldman is not very careful at times. He is generally very good at terminology, but his translations between multiple German terms for Pollaxe and the single English term lead him to say that Pollaxes were not used in battle - a conclusion he draws from the usage of a single German term, and applies to all of Europe. A cursory study of English or French warfare of the period would show that pollaxes were absolutely used in combat!

Another case where his argument is not convincing is when he argues for the invalidity of the 1982 experiments that showed halberd blades as incapable of penetrating helmets or breastplates (a test which used low-value 16th or 17th century munition armour and low-value 17th century halberds...not something most American curators would approve in any case!!!). In the same tests, the -beak- of the halberd was able to penetrate both helmet and breastplate. He makes some decent points - that the head may not have been attached correctly (it came loose when the blade hit the armour) and that the man swinging it may not have been skilled enough. He also argues that 17th century halberds may not reflect the metallurgical quality of 15th century halberds, but the same can be said of late 16th century munition armour compared with 15th century armour! Much less convincingly, he argues that battlefield graves and contemporary art show or imply penetration by halberd blades, so we should take this as authoritative and never mind the experimental archaeology. I don't buy it.

Firstly, the successful penetration of the armour by the beak shows that both the skill of the wielder and the attachment of the head were sufficient to penetrate armour when using a better tool. Secondly, the idea that halberd blades were armour-penetrators is belied by the increasingly strong beaks and spikes on halberds that develop around the same time as plate armour. Basic mechanics dictates that the same force concentrated in a smaller area will penetrate armour better than that force distributed over a large area. So, if spikes were (as we can tell from the math) better at penetrating armour, we would expect to see more of them in weapons...and we do! Beaks are uncommon in the earlier halberds but nearly universal in 15th and 16th century halberds (and present in other polearms as well). Now at the same time blades did tend to become heavier and more compact - could this have been for penetrating armour other than helmets and breast-plates - IE the thinner armour of the arms? Maybe! Keep in mind that helmets and breastplates are the thickest part of armour (helmets especially). And perhaps some infantry helmets were not so resistant to blows as others.

Regarding art, I think we can't take it as a photojournalistic account of what actually happened - artists, even when they are eyewitnesses, weren't necessarily just 'showing what they saw' and their audience wasn't necessarily expecting that - the -idea- of slaughter is more important than the details of slaughter. Hence armoured men being cut in half in the Morgan Bible. As to battlefield graves, as Waldman himself admits it is impossible to know how these people died - given the number of casualties that occurred after one side had routed, people with the crown of their skull cleaved off may well have been stripped of their helmets.

But with this said, Waldman himself provided much of the information I used above - about the form of the halberd especially. Any book that gives you enough information to refute some of its arguments has some value, I think. And as a source of -information-, as a -descriptive- account of what polearms were and what they looked like, this book is very valuable.

EDIT: after this I am going to read Matthias Goll's Phd thesis on the armour industry (available for free here: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/17203/ )

I think I may put aside The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. I'm just into the Taylor administration now and about halfway through the non-notes part of the book.

The whole chapter a day system is in ruins thanks to you know why. It's fighting for space with a plan to read more slavery studies, particularly early Atlantic world stuff, and reading more about white supremacy qua white supremacy, also because you know why.

I've been reading David Ussishkin's article Was Jerusalem a fortified stronghold in the Middle Bronze Age? - an alternative view (Levant 48, 2, summer 2016). It's a really simple article in that it merely reassesses some past research on the history of Jerusalem (specifically, Kenyon's excavation of the walls in the 60s). Ussishkin argues that Kenyon's interpretation of the stratigraphy wrongly supports a Middle Bronze Age dating for Jerusalem's walls, and instead suggests - based on his own interpretation of her excavation - that they date to the 7th century BCE.

It's great because it supports my own research, but on the other hand he doesn't really offer any evidence that the construction of the walls has to be dated to the 7th century BCE... so it's more of a 'we can't really tell enough from what we've excavated but it might equally be much later than we assumed.' Either way it's interesting stuff - Jerusalem not being walled until Hezekiah's reign would be a big deal.

The pictures of the massive line at Susan B. Anthony's grave on Election Day made me kinda sad that there were probably scores of deserving women who didn't make the high school history cut and so likely weren't being remembered with a single sticker. So the next day I was at the local university library with a toddler and a stack of women's suffrage histories. (By the by, college campuses may be horrible places to try to find a changing table, but they're wonderful for running into strangers thrilled at the novelty of seeing a toddler jogging along talking about squirrels.)

First up in my stack is Rebecca J. Mead's How the West Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914 to address some of my unanswered questions from the Election Day Megathread about why women's suffrage came first to so many western states and territories. I'm only a few chapters in, but so far my main conclusion is that the statehood process just naturally raised the question. In addition, small territorial legislatures were easy to lobby, though subject to being overridden by Congress, while land grant universities seem to have led to a higher proportion of professional women in the west (including, notably for the suffrage movement, journalists). Some folks made arguments about suffrage attracting much-needed women, but I can't tell that it's as significant as the headline explanations claim. National leaders like Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton toured, too, making connections with local leaders and organizations, but it still reads very much as a story of the People's Front of Judea versus the Judean People's Front, with factions stemming from such varied roots as the labor movement and the stolidly middle-class temperance movement. And then there are the people who should get along on policy but simply can't because so-and-so keeps hogging the stage. And if you don't want to found your own group, you can always oust a female leader by accusing her of advocating free love.

Since I live in Colorado, I'm looking forward to getting into the meat of our state constitutional convention and then the 1877 and 1893 referenda, especially as Caroline Churchill Nichols so far seems only slightly less contrarian than Abigail Scott Duniway. Hopefully I'll make some more progress on it over the holiday.

I'm currently studying a copy of the Rostocksches Stadtrecht (Rostock City Law) from 1757 that I've recently acquired in an attempt to better understand the day to day life inside the city walls during that time. What surprised me most so far is that sorcery and telling the future were still punishable by death (through fire or breaking wheel).

The beauty of it is that I managed to find an unbound copy that consists entirely of the uncut print sheets. Can't get much better than that.

Started poking through Jim Corum's The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-1940, which is kinda unusual since I normally don't care for air power subjects. Really good though, even if it hasn't touched on what I thought it would so far (use of airpower at the operational level of war). Might want to check if the library has Corum's biography of Wolfram von Richtofen.

Got back into Duffy's classic Military Experience of the Age of Reason and Chandler's The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough. Good reads, though I probably would have organized them differently, maybe start with a chapter laying out the basics of strategy in the period, rather than considering the arms of service in turn or the stages of a person's experience in an army.

Broadly, have noticed a contempt for strategic orthodoxy of the 18th century, which doesn't sit well with me. To be fair, professional training was relatively primitive in the period, so their methods are dictated by experience; the period of positional strategy wouldn't have lasted three hundred years if it didn't work.

Could someone recommend some readings about antisemitism following WWII in Germany? It'd really help to balance out a paper I'm writing.

Can anyone recommend a good source on Chinese shipping in the Ming and/or Qing dynasties? I'd prefer Ming, but I'll take anything at this point.

I am in the process of organizing my materials to present my MA topic on Monday (Evolving discourse of food and culinary education in the United States in the wake of the Industrial Revolution 1830-1900) and I've been reading Carole Gilman Howard's, "Recollections of a Housekeeper". This book is really interesting because it is published in 1834 as a fictional auto-biography. The narrator is an older woman who is reflecting on her trials and tribulations with learning how to run a household away from her family. In this period, many women were leaving their family home to work in factories, but their primary goal was not to find a career, it was to find a husband. The issue here is that when these women left for more urban areas, they did not receive a traditional domestic education. So, Howard's work is essentially a novelized version of having your grandmother teach you the best ways to get oil stains out of silk (there is literally a chapter that consists of anecdotes of how stains happened and how to remove them).

It's free online and doesn't take long to read, I suggest everyone read it. It is a fascinating look at how American society was grappling with the huge impact the Industrial Revolution had on changing the way domestic education took place.

I am currently working on several pieces for classes. The primary work is a 15-20 page paper that discusses the effects of Christianity on Native populations in the Americas, with a focus on the Nez Perce Tribe. But it will also include a large section of my personal experiences with Christianity as a Native person. But it needs a lot of context.

One book I am really getting into in order to understand the spread of the "Good Book" is entitled Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 and it is a very interesting work. Definitely on my recommend list.

Do you know of any book that deals with the Četnik/четник resistance in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia during the 1940s? The guerrilla operations are interesting but I more interested by their ideology and politics.

Thanks