I've been doing research lately into warfare in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries (from the rise and fall of pike-and-shot through the Napoleonic wars) and I've seen conflicting accounts as to whether munitions armor, specifically the breastplate/cuirass, could halt or bounce a musketball at varying ranges. To try and further my understanding I've been seeking out video demonstrations but the only test I've been able to find is this short one at extremely close range. Given how long the musket and the breastplate shared the battlefield before the latter's ultimate demise, I figured there would be more information on the subject - would anyone have any recommendations for books, studies, etc to look into for firearm effectiveness against armor?

Christmas, thank Pegāna, was decently mild—& I succeeded in dragging my elder aunt down town for the first time in a year & a half—to partake of an old-time Christmas feast with plum pudding and all, at the hospitable refectory of that staunch upholder of ancient English tradition—Chin Lee, Esq., (a very distant eastern connexion—phonetically at least—of the main Virginia line of Stratford & Arlington!) who so liberally stocked you with chow mein at our little pre-Maxfield supper last June.

• H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 17 Dec 1929, Letters to James F. Morton 212

This was the Chin Lee Co., which advertised in the Providence, Rhode Island city directory as serving "American & Chinese" food; it might surprise some folks that Lovecraft patronized Chinese restaurants - I don't know if Lovecraft could be said to be either a picky or an adventurous eater, but he was typically on a tight budget - especially around Christmas time, but there are several accounts of such visits in his letters. Of course, the jocular bit equating Chin Lee as a "distant relation" of Robert E. Lee is Lovecraft's trademark humor.

Ended up reading New England Bound, a quite new study of slavery in colonial New England. It succeeds...but that's a bit of the problem. There's some really great content in here, particularly in the first few chapters situating New England in the larger Atlantic world and explaining the interaction of settler colonialism and slavery. And it turns out Samuel Maverick was trying to breed those slaves he brought to Massachusetts. So there's that. By any reasonable standard, it's a great book that I'm glad I read.

The problem is that small-scale slavery in New England looks so much like small-scale slavery elsewhere that I felt like I'd read the back half of the book at least two or three times before. There are a lot of good illustrative incidents, but very little of it felt like news.

From there I've gone over to David Eltis' The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. It's about 300 pages of main text, which circa 100 in feels like two or three times that because it's so dense and heavy on theory. Eltis situates slavery in the wider scheme of European expansion, which is great except that I don't find vanilla European migration all that interesting. I think that I was hoping for a chunkier version of Inhuman Bondage or Many Thousands Gone but more tilted toward the early end. Eltis has sort of written that, but it's so thick with analysis that I frequently feel the forest is getting lost. He asks lots of good questions and gives decent answers to them, but I end up losing the plot sometimes in the "if this, then that, but also this, yet still not that, and here's a page of statistics" way he presents some of them.

I have been reading Egypt in Italy by Molly Swetnam Burland, it is quite new (2016) but it is a fairly solid read that takes a more holistic and comprehensive look at Egyptian art, culture and commodities in a Roman context than the majority of literature does with such a complicated exchange. The author examines the literary and material evidence as well as the approaches of modern scholars in various fields to better understand the importance of Egyptian commodities in Rome from the First Century BCE through the Imperial Period, and in social contexts ranging from localized cultic shrines, private collections, Imperial dedications and everything in between.

It also looks at the political background and commercial logistics of the trade in materials, products and artifacts originating in Egypt, while challenging the frequently invoked comparison between Roman interest in contemporary and ancient Egypt (both of course being relative to the time period) to modern Egyptomania in Europe.

Aside from that I am also going over Culture of Fear in Curacao: Shackles of Fear and Silence; A Cultural Paradox (also newer, 2008) which has been quite useful to understanding the societal and cultural framework that many of the Island's residents inhabit and many of its components can be applied to other island nations in the Caribbean as well given their shared histories and similar racial divides and socioeconomic pressures. Strictly speaking, this book is not a history but it draws from historical trends and the changes in Curacaoan living over the generations to find the roots of many of the social issues so many struggle with today. Quite often Haiti is the go-to example for these kinds of topics but each island has a different cultural and historical spin on the familiar story: slavery, colonization and life after independence, so I would recommend this to anyone interested in the subject, either as a historical subject or modern topic.