This is one more for the grad students:

Having just passed (!!!) my comprehensive exam, I wonder if there's not a better way to structure these. At my school, the bulk of the exam is an 1.5 hour oral exam, which the student takes without notes or any kind of pre-written response. While this is a good test of recall and improvisation, there's not really any moment in our careers beyond this point where we'll have to do anything remotely like this. Should comps be more akin to writing a syllabus or defending an article at a conference rather than a wide-ranging conversation?

I'll start with my favourite history books I read this year.

Started getting into the French Revolution to complement my knowledge of The Early American Republic and my interest of Early American Foreign policy through religion and how religious leaders in America influenced the discussion of IR in the infant nation. And so I read the great book by Peter Mcphee, Liberty Or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). It is highly engaging and accessible. As it spends most of its time on the years preceding the 1790s up until the 1800s.

Finally got around to Reading Sven Beckerts Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015) which won the highly regarded Bancroft Prize and it as good as every review I have read. As the title of the book suggests it examines the global history of the cotton industry as it weaves a fantastic narrative.

Another awesome book that has been quite around is Richard Krautheimers Rome: A Profile of a City, 312-1308 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, though I believe it was originally published in the 1980s). It is a fantastic if though dense examination of the politics and religion of Rome as a city through examining it's architectural development in about a thousand years. So you get a great sense of how Christianity as both a religion and a political force came to be the identity of Rome.

Why is there an issue within the Indian academic and political world with the Indoeuropean migrations into South Asia? Would anyone be able to give some links or readings I should check out?

This one is for the historians:

Very often within this sub it is emphasized that history is NOT a science, but a philosophical discipline. What exactly do you mean by this? Is it the difference of methods because it is next to impossible to formulate a hypothesis which can be comprehensively tested? If so, what exactly is the historical method and does it allow for any certainty of fact? What is the epistemology of history?

Hey, i'm looking to interview a historian on the french colonization of Vietnam for my Vietnam class in my highschool. I need to get an interview for my project and i would really appreciate an interview before monday.

Please email me at snakelboat@gmail.com if you have an offer