What are some good books on the history of Japan, for someone who doesn't know the first thing about the country? (I have no idea which different "eras" it went through, what the difference between a daimyo and a shogun is, or even where most of the major cities are.) Japan intrigues me because it's one of the rare countries that manages to run a democratic and highly developed society on a completely different cultural "operating system" than Europe or North America, so I'd like to learn more about their history. Ponderous tomes welcome; it's a large topic so it deserves large books.

I've seen Japan Emerging recommended in the subreddit reading list, but I'm a bit put off by the very few Japanese names in the list of authors; I try to make a point of reading each country's history from the perspective of its own historians, or else I'll end up reading about the whole world from a near-exclusively British and American perspective. So works (co-)written by Japanese historians would be a big plus.

Thanks!

I’m beginning work on a seminar paper on how the participants in the Pelagian Controversy used letters as ways to exercise their power. In order to talk about power, then, I’ve been looking at different theorists of power. So far I’ve read Weber and Foucault, with Geertz and Mann coming up soon. As I usually do, I find Weber’s definition to have a certain simplistic elegance. “In general, we understand by ‘power’ the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action.”

Honestly, I’m having trouble incorporating Foucault’s idea of power into it. As far as I understand it, from Discipline and Punish and volume one of History of Sexuality, Foucault doesn’t see power as something exercised by individuals, but rather as something discursively spread throughout the entirety of social existence. I don’t see, then, how he could understand any sort of “power-move” by any individual. If Augustine sends a letter to accuse Pelagius of heresy, and his letter is accepted as something that Pelagius must answer at the Council of Jerusalem, is not Augustine asserting his power over Pelagius? Certainly this allows for a type of resistance; how Pelagius reacts to it, or how the presiding bishop reacts to it. But even this kind of power-resistance seems more Weberian than Foucauldian. Does anyone have any thoughts?

I'm working on a paper about human rights in the Spanish colonies. My goal is to disprove the notion that human rights culture was exclusively a product of the enlightenment and the French Revolution.

I've been told to look at the writings of Francisco de Vittoria and Bartolome de las Casas. Is there anyone else who I should be looking at? Las Casas in particular wrote quite a bit. Which of his works would best encapsulate what I'm trying to prove?

Any book recommendations would be appreciated. Someone could probably write a book on the subject, but I do have a limited amount of time and only so much space to fit all this into.

Does anyone know a good book about newspapers-as-newspapers in the antebellum period?

Jonathan Earle's Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil really turned around on me. I expected him to go full Wilentz and pretend slavery was a minor interest in the antebellum Democracy, anointing the antislavery dissidents as the One True Party. Nope. I still have my issues with how he likes to compare antislavery Dems in mainstream politics to Garrisonians, rather than to antislavery Whigs and the chapter on David Wilmot is a real nadir about how Wilmot's racism existed but definitely was not much involved with his antislavery politics, despite Wilmot telling us it was in his most famous speech. It's a bit more couched, but basically that's the argument.

Then Earle gets back to talking about the actually existing Democracy that largely drove its antislavery wing out. It's not perfect, but it's much more in the vein of recovering the lately neglected antislavery strain of Democratic thought than carrying water for the Andrew Jackson Fan Club.

From there I started up Slavery at Sea for the AMA. It's about what one would expect from a slave trade book that doesn't lose itself in the numbers debate, full of horrors. Chapters concern things like murder, suicide, the murder of children, sexual violence, disease...you get the idea. The ebook has the occasional typo that can be a bit distracting and it's not a light read, but that's a small price to pay. My main regret now that I'm nearly finished is that I've not read a more general work first. Mustakeem focuses on somewhat neglected elements of the trade and what I have picked up by osmosis and glancing discussions in Americanist works isn't quite enough to bridge the gap.

I was wondering, any good books on the Polish Partitions? I've been interested in the time period, especially in the governmental reforms made the the Polish government before it was finally annexed.

Someone from home had shared this blog entry on Facebook about how a ravine used to traverse a large part of our town before it was filled in and built over.

What caught my eye, however, was an entry on a building that used to be on Tezcuco (Texcoco) Street. Now, I knew we had a Montezuma Avenue and a Montezuma Park, but I never noticed a Tezcuco Street in town. That may be because it is only a few blocks long and there is only one road sign that actually names the street. I find it a little funny that you have these Nahuatl (or Anglicized Nahuatl) names all the way up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I'm really curious as to why these names were chosen way back in the early history of the area. Did some city planner happen to read a book on Mexican history and thought it would be fun to use these names? Were they chosen simply because they were exotic? Is there a treasure hidden in the area Nicolas Cage is destined to find? I don't know and I'm not sure who to ask, but I would like to find out.

I am planning a (very) non traditional US History Course for my 16 year old homeschooler, which means I'm surrounded by stacks of books and millions of post it notes.

So far I've Chosen A Little History of the United States by Davidson with the exploration guide as our non political spine. We will supplement that with some Zinn, Primary Sources, a truckload of documentaries, and probably Hip Hughes on YouTube.

He is a military history Buff, with a special interest in 20th Century Planes and more recently the socio-political situations that led to the wars.

So far out of my many offered selections he has chosen 13 days by Robert Kennedy, Kenneth Davies' Hidden History of American at War, and Bryson's One Crazy Summer. The rest of the stacks were met with eye rolls and lots of shrugs.

Can you recommend a narrative style work about the Revolutionary or Civil war eras that might draw him in?

Right now he's (slowly) reading The SS, Alibi of a Nation by Reitlinger and a Biography of Rommel and often talking to me about the differences in culpability between the two, so comprehension and content aren't really a concern.

His favorite Novel thus far is The Things They Carried, if that helps at all.