After my recent sojourns into more modern scholarship, and a brief interlude where I read Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, I have returned to the Middle Ages with Jim Bradbury's The Medieval Siege. I'm only 30 odd pages in so far, but it's pretty good. It's improving as I go, which probably reflects how Bradbury's strengths are weighted more toward the high and later Middle Ages, and not so much the early.

One thing I am finding...strange is how it feels simultaneously like an old book, and a somewhat recent one. I think this is a product of Bradbury being a bit on the old side when he wrote it. The thing that sticks out to me is that while the scholarship is great, some of the terminology is quite old. The most obvious case is his references to Muslims, in which he primarily uses either Saracens, or Moslems, neither of which are widely used anymore (nor at the time of the books writing, in the early '90s). It just sometimes feels like I'm reading a book from c.1970. That all said, the actual content is quite interesting so far, and I'll be even more excited once I make it past the year 1000.

Been reading Jonathan Earle's Jacksonian Slavery and the Politics of Free Soil, which alternates between good and really annoying. At its base, the argument that there were antislavery dissidents among the Democracy is totally fine, if old news. On that front, he wrote a prequel to Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. Stylistically, it's more akin to The Political Culture of the American Whigs, which I love, in using capsule biographies to illustrate its points.

And then there's his choice of comparisons. Earle contrasts antislavery Democrats with antislavery Whigs head to head sometimes, taking the mainstream of both contingents as he ought to. The Whigs don't always come out the better for it, which is also fair. But more than halfway through the book I've noticed that most of the time he seems to go to the Garrisonians for his contrasts. That's broadly plausible in that many of them are nominally Whigs, but they're also about the best incidence I've yet seen of a political group self-marginalizing itself into damned near irrelevance. Comparing working politicians -and just about every Democrat Earle has dealt with has held public office- to admirable, but flawed ideologues seems odd. Surely the group to look at for putting the Barnburner Democracy in context is something more like the Seward wing of the Whigs.

The ugly comes when Earle starts talking around white supremacy. He clearly doesn't want to even use the concept if he can help it. Any time he feels he must acknowledge it he gets into this deeply uncomfortable place where white supremacy can't really factor into antislavery (the chapter on Wilmot is painful with this) and anyway everyone was a horrid racist so what's it matter? I don't know why it's so much trouble to accept the consensus that white supremacy has a lot to do with antislavery. Wilmot in particular dreams of an all-white continent and is antislavery emphatically because of that. There's a class argument too -enslavers are the new aristocrats- and you can't just dismiss it, but you can't handwave away the racism either. That would be like ignoring the influence of Democratic political thought on the antislavery coalition that becomes the Republicans, which is the very thing that Earle is writing in large part to correct.

There's a lot of good here, but I suspect that as he's moved into the Democrats purging his antislavery guys I'm going to have to slog through a bunch of prose about how the antislavery ones are the One True Democracy and the others are going to be painted as somehow having gone astray circa 1846. Maybe John Hale or Salmon Chase can buy that, but I can't. The actually existing Democracy was the one that kicked them to the curb.

I'm looking for a history focus to finally settle on (the undergrad classes I've taken at uni are all over the map), and I'm leaning heavily toward GAPE (Gilded Age/Progressive Era).

What would be good introductory texts for this period?

I'm also very much interested in conflicts of the American West, especially the wars between rustlers and cattle barons--think the Johnson County War as representative of my intrigue.

To start on the road to becoming an authority on these periods, where would I begin, book-wise?

In honor of nothing in particular happening today I will review and recommend a historical romance book.

#An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole

This just came out. If you’ve ever wanted to try a Black historical romance, start with this one, and don’t let anyone tell you to start with Beverly Jenkins. Beverly Jenkins is terrible, she could not manage to write her way out of a paper bag, and her sex scenes make me want to reject all carnal knowledge I have ever aquired and only have intense but chaste relationships with little curly-haired dogs forevermore. And for too long it has majorly sucked that the only Black historical romances on the market are written by Beverly Jenkins, and I cannot stress this enough, Jezebel is lying to you and she is seriously bad, but then lo! Along came Alyssa Cole, someone who can write pretty well! The sub-sub-genre is saved!

So what is Historical romance anyway and why should it come in Black? Historical romance is historical fantasy, not just about sex (but it is, even in the clean Christian Historical versions, still mostly about sex) but about emotional life, our fantasies about what we would do and feel and who we would love in history. It is, in the largest way, a fantasy about what a happy and fulfilling life and sexuality for a woman (or for gay men, lesbians, and anyone else not of the majority sexuality and gender) would have looked like in the past. It doesn’t matter that it’s unrealistic, to some extent, so long as we all keep dreaming up some happy endings (lol) for people in the past. It is therefore, pretty importantly bad that this fantasy is largely only available to White women.

This book is about a Black woman, born into slavery but living free in the north for years, acting as a slave in the deep south during the Civil War in order to spy on a Confederate senator, because she has exceptional memory. I don’t mention the dude in the one sentence summary because he’s sort of just there, existing as a Nice Man, also a Cool War Spy with all sorts of Cool Spy Talents, but basically he’s an object lesson in “Not All White Men” that the heroine can sort of work herself around through the book, until she decides to have sex with him. (He, naturally, is infatuated with her from first meeting.) I did think it was interesting that the author made him a Scot displaced by the Highland Clearances, I think she was sort of playing on the uneasy link between today’s Scotch-Irish Americans (“Poor Whites”) and African-Americans, with the effects of multi-generational poverty being more similar than not on those two groups, yet neither of them being really down to party with the other, because of that one thing. I think there’s a little bit more thought behind his character than he would at first appear. The Heroine though is essentially a Civil War version of this.

Let me be clear, you will never put this book into the realm of Literature, it is firmly within the Historical Romance genre, but it’s so well-seated on that magnificent stallion that you must appreciate it just for that, even if you don’t read this genre. The plot in this book is juuuust on the right side of “utterly cracked out things that never happened in all of history.” Her Heroine is juuuust on the right side of “anachronistically-independent strong smart kick-ass Mary Sue,” and her Hero is juuuust on the right side of “generic kind-hearted beefcake who is insipidly repetitive about his love in the face of all odds.” A hair in any direction and the whole house of cards would tumble and make it stupid book, but she pulls it off.

I've picked up Chris Wickham's Medieval Europe and Jeffrey Singman's Daily Life in Medieval Europe, as well as some books on Samuel Beckett (Those are for a class) from my University Library today. I must say, as much as I love electronic resources, there's a particular joy to walking out of a library with a stack of books. So far I've only gotten 30 pages into Wickham, (I'm procrastinating on my actual coursework) but so far I'm finding it readable and intriguing. Definitely feeling the need to contrast it with another survey or two, (Any recommendations?) but it seems pretty solid so far.

Reading The White Death by Allen Chew and just looking for anymore books on The winter or continuation wars. I have Trotters Frozen Hell already. Any help?