I should have saved my FFFA comment yesterday for today! Right now I'm reading:

Leslie Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. As I said yesterday, so good. When you grow up in the west with any interest in history, there are certain things that you learn as rules about royalty, succession, etc. - primogeniture, legal heirs from legal marriages, the necessity of marrying within royalty/the upper aristocracy - and this upends everything, because those aren't universal rules, they're traditions tied to certain times and places.

Jo Paoletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. I had read sections of this previously and used them to write answers for relevant questions, but now I'm sitting down to read the full text. Give me some time to finish reading it and the next time I get a pink/blue question I will be answering it definitively. (Or you could request the book from the library and read it.)

Reading up on the Little Blue Books, particularly with anything specific to Prohibition. The Little Blue Books were the product of E. Haldeman Julius and were cheap (5-10 cents) paper booklets on a wide variety of subjects - philosophy, politics, sex, poetry, classical literature, cocktail recipes, how to write, etc. - which sold in the hundreds of millions, and are quite collectible today. Incredibly innovative from a publishing perspective, they were a favorite of many pulp writers, as they were very accessible and affordable research materials - both H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were fond of the Little Blue Books, and Lovecraft had a letter published in a related journal, the The Haldeman-Julius Weekly.

I've had a reasonably productive couple of weeks. I finished The Race for Paradise by Paul Cobb. It's really good, well worth a read if you're interested in the Crusades, particularly from the Muslim side of things. It's not particularly in depth, but it is really broad and works as a great introduction.

I also read Andrew Lambert's Crusoe's Island, which was...fine I suppose. It was an engaging enough read that I read it all in a little over a week, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it either. It has some interesting anecdotes, and I learned a fair bit reading it, but it has a hard time making clear exactly what it's point is. I learned a lot about the history of the Juan Fernandez Islands, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you why you should care about them. I'd have much preferred more discussion of Defoe and Crusoe, and less of scurvy, if I'm being honest. Still, Lambert is a good enough writer that I didn't dislike my time spent with the book (excepting a really weird penultimate chapter, where he wanders into vague declarations about modern Britain's connections to continental Europe), so if someone gives you a copy you might enjoy reading it. I suspect I won't be keeping my own, though, as I doubt I'll wish to revisit it.

I also read Phil Barnes' A Concise History of the Hawaiian Islands, which is a short (less than 100 pages) introductory history. It was pretty good given it's very short length and its target audience. It worked well at giving me a rough idea of the timeline of Hawaiian history, but did not impart on me much substantial knowledge of any one period. It does have a very good Further Reading section at the end, though, so I know where I'll look next should I wish to return to the subject.

For now, though, I am reading some fantasy and leaving my history books on their shelves. I have a huge pile to dig in to after Christmas, but right now I just want to read about wizards'n stuff.

My lack of self control when it comes to pretty, pretty books has struck again. This time it's Paul Kelton's Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation's Fight Against Smallpox, 1518-1824. I absolutely loved his Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715, which was more of a grand overview. His earlier book focused on the first centuries of contact in the Southeast while presenting evidence against the popular "virgin soil" narrative of demographic decline due to early catastrophic epidemic disease spread. While that overview of the Southeast was wonderful, I am really looking forward to diving deep into the Cherokee story of contact, and all the subsequent impacts of colonialism. Should be fun, and I'll try to report back with a review.

Currently reading the latest issue of FliegerRevueX, a German aviation history magazine.

The cover story is about the Mistel bomber, one of the crazier ideas of the German Luftwaffe. Imagine an unmanned Junkers Ju 88 turned into a bomb with a Messerschmidt Bf 109 bolted to its back as the lead plane.

The weirdest thing is that it actually worked.

Finished up Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. It good at its job, but I'd picked up so much of the content by implication that I don't think I learned as much as I might like.

I've moved on to Southern Slavery and the Law by Thomas Morris, which looks like it's going to be fun but a bit technical for someone without a legal background. Morris explains some basic concepts in the introduction, but his explanations are either a hair too terse or I'm a bit thick. That's what Google's for, though.