/u/Ranolden had asked about the "milk war riot" mentioned in Peter Wilson's most excellent and most enormous The Thirty Years' War: Europe's Tragedy. After a brief search failed to identify Vienna Milk Riot as 1578's chart-topping punk rock band, slightly less exciting search terms filled in some of the details.

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The Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century had powerful territorial princes and some cities independent of them, who were answerable to the emperor but only sort of, and generally at political odds with several of their counterparts. The Reformation of the 1520s heightened tensions as some princes chose church reform as Protestants and some chose church reform as Catholics--picking a side for reasons as much secular-political as personal-spiritual. This went poorly, as you might imagine, but not poorly enough. The princes fought a war, but despite one side's (mainly Catholic) victory, it was not a total enough victory. The 1555 Peace of Augsburg established the principle "cuius regio, eius religio"--"whose region, his religion." Whatever confession a prince picked, his whole territory would adopt it.

This created a couple of big problems. First, Protestant/Catholic divisions were not so geographically neat as to obey territorial boundaries. Especially in the cities in Catholic territory that did not have imperial immediacy--that is, that were answerable to their prince and therefore covered in "eius religio"--there was often a heavy Protestant presence.

Second, where Protestant/Catholic populations were mixed, scholars have shown that both sides moved to more extreme positions in terms of the purity of their own religious practices and in terms of vehement opposition to each other. This played out on a macro (imperial) scale as well as a micro (next parish over) scale.

Against this tense background, Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists/Reformed) and Catholics spent the period between Augsburg and the Milchkrieg unifying and self-defining or redefining as bureaucratic and ideological entities. The Catholic Church mobilizes to start to implement Council of Trent decrees; the Lutherans settle some of the early doctrinal disputes; Reformed Christianity spreads east in what is sometimes called the 'Second Reformation' and basically takes over "Protestantism" outside the Empire as well as within large parts of it. As you can imagine, this focus on self-definition against each other makes the tensions even worse.

Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II kept his court in Prague, not Vienna. But in 1578 (Wilson has the year wrong), he decided to make an appearance in Vienna on an important Catholic feast day, Corpus Christi. This was a particularly contentious celebration from the viewpoint of Protestant/Catholic enmity. "Corpus Christi" is Latin for body of Christ, which is to say, the Eucharist (interpretations of the sacrament being a major theological divide). Vienna, despite being a Catholic heartland, had a significant Protestant population. Earlier post-Luther Corpus Christi celebrations in the city had led to small-scale violence, but in 1578, tensions were higher than ever. And now the emperor was coming.

A key element of celebrating Corpus Christi, a child of the Middle Ages that created the feast, was a full-scale Eucharistic procession (basically a parade) through city streets. In 1578, the Catholic celebrants really lucked out. The bad weather had finally broken; it was a glorious day! Their spirits were high--but also, given the recent history of the feast in their city AND the presence of the emperor, polemically high.

The Protestants of the city and its environs were also psyched about the good weather and eager to take advantage of it. Since they weren't taking part in what they saw as a display of decadent idolatry, a group of them set up market stalls.

"Views differ" on what exactly started things. But one way or another, the crowds involved in the parade as participants or onlookers knocked over some of the stalls. The resulting chaos triggered a combination of rioting and fears of something greater. Some people were terrified of a Viennese version of the St. Bart's Day massacre; others simply feared for their own lives. Protestant theologian Stephen Gerlach took great delight in recounting all the Catholic priests who preferred to strip naked rather than be seen (and wounded or killed) as Catholics.

In Europe's Tragedy, Wilson points to the riot's negative effects on the emperor and his ability/will to govern. More generally, the Milchkrieg is seen as the first real sign that the Peace of Augsburg was not only not sustainable, but well on its way to shattering.

Catastrophically.

Read Azerbaijan: A Political History by Suka Bolukbasi (2013):

Despite the title, the book devotes less than 10 of its 220 pages to post-Soviet Azerbaijan, and even less to the Heydar Aliev era (and nothing about Ilham). It is also goes heavily into the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, going into the minutiae of that dispute with Armenia. That said, it is a refreshing look at the conflict, considering nearly all the literature on the topic in English comes from authors with ties to Armenia. Bolukbasi is Turkish, a close ally of Azerbaijan, so he is not exactly neutral in his account either, but if one keeps that in mind while reading, it does prove an interesting look at how Azerbaijan developed in the late Soviet era, and how tied it's identity is to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. However more details on the post-1991 era would have made it a much better read, and its not hard to notice the over-reliance on Thomas de Waal's Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War for nearly everything relating to the conflict.

Some very short book reviews:

Blomberg, Craig L. The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs. B&B Studies in Christian Apologetics. Nashville: B&B Academic, 2016. Pp. xxxi, 783.

• Blomberg attempts to defend the historicity of the New Testament texts, often by addressing questions of provenance and internal contradictions. Although Blomberg does highlight problems with the standard arguments challenging the trustworthiness of the New Testament, most of the proposals that he presents also appear unconvincing in the absence of corroborating evidence; the opinions of like-minded scholars represent a very poor substitute for actual sources. I would not recommend this book except to those interested in a selective overview of the field from an Evangelical perspective.

Krebs, Christopher B. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Pp. 303.

• Krebs examines the history and reception of the Germania, an ethnographic work on the ancient "Germans" by the Roman historian Tacitus. Krebs's narrative certainly feels well-crafted, but he never seems to offer enough depth or detail to adequately represent the myriad of topics that come up throughout the work (e.g., the Renaissance, nationalism, Hitler); most frustratingly, in my opinion, the author fails to situate the misuse of the Germania within the wider context of nineteenth-century classical scholarship. I would only recommend this book to those interested in its premise.

Lemaire, André. Levantine Epigraphy and the History in the Achaemenid Period (539-332 BCE). The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 137.

• Lemaire, one of the world's leading experts on Semitic epigraphy, discusses not only recently published inscriptions but also new interpretations of old inscriptions, all concerning the Levant during the Persian period. However, Lemaire does not really address the various problems surrounding the use of unprovenanced texts, which constitute a decent portion of the new evidence. Still, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a relatively up-to-date overview of the topic.

Moya, Jose C. Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xviii, 567.

• Moya discusses the history of Spanish immigrants in Buenos Aires; a brief review can hardly do justice to the breadth and depth of his investigation as well as the multiplicity of his insights. Moya accomplishes his goal, more-or-less, of assessing the role of individual agency amid "the interaction of macrostructural and microsocial forces." While the sheer amount of data may prove overwhelming for a general audience, the book remains well-written all throughout, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in thinking about patterns of emigration and immigration beyond push-pull factors.

Morning,

I'm currently student teaching and right now we are covering Mesopotamia and Hammurabi's Code. I looked at the book section in the wiki but found it lacking for my topic, can anyone suggest some good books?

Good evening, I'm searching for books regarding the Communist Party of Indonesia, particularly around the 1960's can anyone help me ?

Can anyone recommend a biography of Thurgood Marshall?

For my sins I'm reading General Flynn's Field of Fight. It's mediocre.

Been reading Thomas Morris' Southern Slavery and the Law. It's informative...and ridiculously technical. I expected parts of it to read like a law review, but most of it is that way. There's a whole chapter on whether slaves were exclusively, primarily, or partially classed as chattel or real property. Usually chattel, but with some real...and it doesn't actually matter that much from the slave's POV or analytically for us. The chapter on slave rental turns largely on what kind of liability one was under if a slave was injured or killed.

It's worthwhile, and I hope that the chapters that get into the slaves status more as people (just starting them now) pick up a bit. But damn, it's a slog. Large parts of it feel more like slave state law school than a history. It's exclusively a legal history; illustrative incidents only arise as facts of cases and there's not a lot of scrutiny into what may have prompted shifts in legal doctrines or the circumstances that created them, unless it's in the stuff I've yet to get to.

The most frustrating thing for me is that he does his due diligence with change over time and differences between jurisdictions. So you know that different states come to opposing answers on technical questions...but then he rarely says why. There's a trend to more commodification, but that's about it unless I've badly missed something.