I'm doing a moderately intensive weekend of research into medieval European pickling, particularly the question of whether it was available to peasants as a food preservation strategy. Thus far I have dodged the rabbit hole of medieval Chinese food, and ventured carefully into the badger setts and wolf dens of medieval orthodontics and German ceramic ware. I'm currently on the general availability of salt and vinegar, and trying not to be distracted by Anglo-Saxon economics.

This week I finished The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez. The book recently won the Bancroft Prize, and helped bring the Native American slave trade further into the public consciousness. What follows is a brief review of the book.

Reséndez did a wonderful job of weaving together the most recent scholarship surrounding Native American slavery. His narrative focuses chiefly on native slavery throughout the Spanish Empire, but does briefly mention the English slave trade in the Southeast U.S. and the trade in Amerindian slaves through New France. Like all great reviews, the evidence and sources existed in the published literature, but the author brought those sources together to illustrate the pervasive nature of Amerindian bondage throughout the Americas. Far from isolated incidents, the drive to control human labor existed throughout the New World and proved tremendously difficult to eradicate despite attempts to outlaw the practice.

This brings us to the purpose of the title. Unlike the legalized practice of African slavery, which is obvious in the historical record due to taxes, wills, and bills of sale, "the other slavery" persisted over centuries despite the Spanish crown prohibiting Native American bondage in all circumstances in 1524. To fully encapsulate the various methods of controlling Native American slavery Reséndez expanded "the other slavery" to include "forcible removal of the victim from one place to another, inability to leave the workplace, violence or threat of violence to compel them to work, and nominal or no pay." Using this foundation he tracks how the Native American slave trade ebbed and flowed, adapted and morphed, over centuries, adding to the toxic cocktail of colonialism.

One strength of the conclusion in the book is it's focus on the plastic nature of "the other slavery". Reséndez highlights how the recent focus on new forms of slavery is myopic because it "underestimate(s) the staying power and extraordinary adaptability of slavery itself." Studying Native American slavery shows how far from a single institution, other slaveries exist as a kaleidoscope of practices suited to different markets and regions. This brings me to one of the best lessons from the book...

Since those who benefit from forced labor will always find ways to get around the law, it is necessary to deploy a very flexible and dynamic regulatory system that matches the adaptability of involuntary servitude. (p.320)

Finally, one thing I wish Reséndez, and for that matter most historians of Native American slavery, focused on is the demographic repercussions of slaving raids. While African slavery placed premiums on male captives, Amerindian women and children continually fetched higher prices due to the preference for those captives as household servants. When you selectively remove reproductive-aged females from small scale foraging or horticulture populations you significantly influence that group's ability to rebound from demographic insults (like smallpox epidemics). Many authors say this selective removal would have greater demographic repercussions for a group's survival than periodic epidemics, but they don't show this influence. The demographer in me really wants someone (heck, this might have to be me) to run a couple of models. In one model we assume no slaving raids, just periodic epidemics with acquired immunity every ten years or so. The other model would combine slaving raids removing a significant chunk of reproductive-aged females, followed by an epidemic, and see what has a longer term influence on demographic recovery. My hunch is poorer recovery when you combine slaving raids and epidemics, but thus far no one has really shown that.

I'm still reading Bradbury's Medieval Siege. I read the section on Crusades 1-3 this week, and it was better than I expected. Given that it was written at a time when Runciman was still the most comprehensive work on the subject, I expected it to be more problematic. It's hardly perfect, and there are definitely areas where recent scholarship would change his analysis, but overall it was pretty good.

Overall, at about the 1/3rd point, I'm liking it, but it's also a weird book. Bradbury's style makes it easy to read, but hard to characterize his overall arguments. The whole book feels a little weird, as siege narratives bleed into discussions of the practice of siege warfare in general, which then moves on to discuss changing power structures in Europe and new technologies. Some of this is Bradbury's style, and he manages to make this seem very natural, and some of this is the subject. Siege warfare is complicated, because most sieges used the same broad technologies and strategies, but also each siege had its own set of unique challenges and circumstances, making a generalist analysis very difficult. While I think Bradbury could be doing better than he is, I don't think he's doing badly at explaining a really messy and complicated subject.

My local second hand bookshop managed to get hold of a new copy of "Mercenaries and Paid Men", which I'm really looking forward to reading. In the meantime, I'm reading Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel as part of a little article I want to do that lays down a basic canon for authors who want to write medieval fantasy. I'm learning a lot, but I do need to double check a few things, because there is some very old research (the Gies believe in the use of ringmail, for instance) in the book.

Edit: While I'm thinking of it, has there been a more recent general work on medieval warfare than Maurice Keen's Medieval Warfare that is more up to date, but no less comprehensive?

Ghost Stories was a weird pulp in a lot of ways; pulp scholars have traced its origins to the early Physical Culture magazines of Sandow, which spun off a Mental Culture magazine that started dipping into telepathy and the paranormal, and then that was married with the "confession" style pulp to produce Ghost Stories - which claimed to be real stories of actual hauntings and supernatural occurrences, as interpreted by pulp writers - compare with the ghostwritten adventures of Harry Houdini in Weird Tales, including "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" by H. P. Lovecraft. Ghost Stories was never really a rival of Weird Tales as such, but it attracted quite a few authors during its run who are better-known elsewhere, such as Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Hugh B. Cave, etc. One particular anecdote that grabbed my eye recently:

Anyone acquainted with the work of Bierce will know his collection of 'Mysterious Disappearances' published in his volume CAN SUCH THINGS BE? (Cassell, 1893). One of these brief items, 'The Difficulty of Crossing a Field' (originally published in the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, 14 October 1888), tells of a planter in Alabama called Williamson, who set off across a field to check out his horses and disappeared in full view of everyone. He was never seen again. An article in the April 1930 GHOST STORIES purports to be by the daughter of the man who disappeared, and she tells the whole story. The piece, 'Between Two Worlds', was written by Stuart Palmer, presumably from a discussion or earlier draft by Sarah Emma Lang. her account, which includes a sworn affidavit of truth, witnessed by a Pubic Notary, is very similar to Bierce's account. Her father, David Lang, who lived in Tennessee, loved his horses. On a clear, warm, summer's day in September 1880 he set off to heck his horses and vanished. Bierce had clearly changed the name and locale, presumably to keep their identity a secret, and he also changed the date, setting the story twenty-six years earlier, but to all intents it is the same story. Sarah Lang, who was only eleven at the time of her father's disappearance, remembers Bierce visiting the farm soon afterwards. Sarah's story is more complete, including the revelation that, while she and her brother stood in the field, they heard their father's voice calling for help. Bierce used this episode in a different report called 'Charles Ashmore's Trail.' Although this is a very different story, set in Illinois in 1878, in which a boy sets out one November evening to draw water from the well, and also disappears--indeed, his footsteps in the snow come to a dead halt--Bierce does record the mother hearing the sound of her son's voice four days later. Both of these stories were picked up as anecdotes years later by Algernon Blackwood, who converted them into his own story, 'Strange Story of a Texas Farm Disappearance' (THE LISTENER, 13 May 1948), which he recounted endlessly at parties and on radio and television. Although he further embellished the story, it is undoubtedly based on the same original. What is interesting in Sarah Lang's account is that she reports that, after her mother's death, Sarah went on to develop her powers as a medium and, after years of trying, received a message from her father, which came through in automatic writing (the message is reproduced in GHOST STORIES) and told Sarah that her father and mother were now reunited. Alas, the father never revealed how he had disappeared, or where he had been for fifty years.

• Mike Ashley, PHANTOM PERFUMES AND OTHER SHADES (2000)

This is going to sound rather niche, but does anyone here know about a book on the change in deserts in Europe from medieval to modern? Since it's a well known (at least for people who look into the subject) that deserts tended to get sweeter and sweeter as time passed, becoming more decadent and luscious. I'm wondering if there is a book on this subject, thank you!

Edit. Sorry to shill a bit, but I'll just ping my new subreddit /r/Archaiccooking for anyone interested in more discussion on the topic.

I am the random guy on the internet who did the podcast on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas Egerton is an actual, proper historian and wrote Year of Meteors, which he says is the first book on the election of 1860 in decades. It introduces Stephen Douglas, everyone's favorite hard-drinking amoral doughface railroad promoter, through a flashback to Kansas-Nebraska times.

That was unfortunate. He makes two fairly serious errors, one possibly just misleading and the other one straight out WTF by way of reporting a story we've known for decades isn't true. It's dismissed in at least two books that he cites. By the end of the chapter I was fairly sour on the book, but I kept on. Two-thirds of the way through now and I'm fairly sure I've learned nothing. There seem to be no new ideas here and novel-to-me content looks like just anecdotes culled from biographies of the principals. Combine that with a fairly light bibliography (Egerton leans heavily on standard antebellum surveys.) and I don't think there's a lot here. I mean sure you can reference Battle Cry of Freedom's chapter on the election in your book on the election...but why would you? A lot of this looks downright tertiary, not helped by the errors upfront or the popular press it came off.

I'm not a snob about this stuff; I know popular presses sometimes release good history, especially when it's something Lincoln-adjacent and political. But I feel like Egerton realized the sesquicentennial was coming up circa 2005 and just spent a couple years reading biographies. Then he used them as decoration for the standard narrative of the election. At least it's an easy read.

Will probably finish in a couple of days, which means it's time to decide if I'm set to go back into slavery studies direct or if I want to put up with Donald's biography of Charles Sumner. It's full of vintage Sixties-era hating on antislavery people -Sumner can't just hate slavery, he has to be somehow psychologically damaged to do so- which was at least within scholarly norms at the time but looks uglier every year.

I've read Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World about 6 years ago. Recently I've been wanting to revisit the Mongol world, and have been wondering if there are any podcasts that cover Mongol history.

Also any other books you can recommend on the subject would be great!

Lately I've been working on research and design for a prototype digital documentary edition on graphic portrayal of British imperial conflict in 19th century print. It's especially focused on the Second Anglo-Afghan War and animalization of foreign enemies. This week my co-authors and I have been finishing up the first draft of the edition. It's been a pretty interesting experience seeing as this is the first edition I've worked on and British imperial history isn't really my field.