Random Bullets of Crap from a French Archive:

• When the archivist hands you a folder that feels substantially heavier than a folder of parchment should feel, you're about to get Papally Bulled.

• Nothing feels better than digging through a 40cm high stack of a 17th-century priest's musing about his breakfast than finding an original 11th century charter at the bottom of the stack. Totally worth it.

• Conversely, nothing feels more demoralising than digging through a 40cm high stack of a 17th-century priest's musings on his lunch, only to find yet more musings about his dinner, and nothing medieval at all.

• I now know why we have proportionally so few Early Modernists on this sub, particularly anyone working from archival rather than printed sources. TL;DR: The printing press made everyone's handwriting go to shit.

I'm not currently working on anything but I'm looking at doing a survey of divorce and remarriage within the Norse canon. This will be a pretty hefty undertaking. Going to need to search out and read/translate at least all the Norse (Old Icelandic) prose works. Depending on what sort of things I'm finding may look into the poems as well but we'll see.

So yeah. Not sure what the end goal is. Hopefully I end up with enough material to put together an actual argument. Regardless, it'll be interesting reading/rereading everything.

If anyone knows of any scholarly work that might be relevant or that has already done this, I'd love to hear about it. Did a little preliminary searching but didn't really find anything. Would hate to be retreading someone else's work without branching off in some way.

By the way, if you told me a couple years ago that I would be looking at doing something like this for fun I would have looked at you like you were crazy. I'm still not sure I haven't lost my mind.

I put up Black Marxism in favor of The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, which I'm reading in hopes of answering a question from a few weeks ago. It's a 1940 text with additions in 1964 and boy does it show. There's a slightly testy note at the front about how the author has accepted the then-new convention and capitalized Negro.

The chapter "Aliens in a Slave Country" is a mixed bag of people who are politically sort of alien to the dominant culture, but may have been there for ages (Quakers), recent immigrants (fairly decent survey of 'em, basically in line with what I've seen in later works), and cringe. The pages on the South's tiny Jewish population are full of references to "the Hebrew". Louisiana Creoles are described in a series of unflattering stereotypes largely just left on the page to speak for themselves. Pretty sure lots of ordinary Anglo-Saxons loved their luxuries and didn't want to work too hard either, considering they bought people to do that for them, but there's nothing about lowcountry planters lounging around in Charleston instead of managing their operations in person.

I'm still getting a lot out of the book -I can see why it's still cited- but it's also at least partaking in a whole pile of really nasty stereotypes. They're the kind that largely pass unnoticed in 1940 and maybe in '64 too but eesh. Realized in the course of reading that the author, Clement Eaton, is also wrote The Mind of the South, which has been described to me as arguing for "no such thing."

Relatedly, I think my academic skim is getting better. I can't quite make myself read books out of sequence enough to go through each chapter and read the intros and conclusions first, etc, but I feel like I about have the business of picking out which sentences and paragraphs are the important ones for the argument and which are more further illustration. If I can keep this up I might see about upping my chapter a day benchmark a tad.

Is this the right thread to ask for suggestions about a general history of the post-WWII world with a focus on non-Western continents? It's for a competitive exam, so it does not have to be particularly innovative.

Have been endlessly procrastinating a tabletop test session trying to construct a theatre of operations for an [early 19th century] army, mostly compiling agricultural and demographic data, as well as anecdotes that can serve as the basis of encounters.

To that end, I've been enjoying my post-graduation time off picking through Clausewitz's more practical chapters about supply and cantonments, Edward Porter Alexander's memoirs, a great web page on medieval demography, James C. Scott's description of the Southeast Asian highlands, the topography of the Alleghenies, Polybius's description of the Alpine Celtic kingdoms Hannibal encountered, etc.

I'm looking for book/paper/whatever recommendations on Slovak history prior to WW2. Of particular interest is the Bardejov area, though I know that might be getting a bit too specific!