Last night a Google Scholar alert popped up to tell me that a new book which matched my keywords had been published. I was reasonably excited to see that it was titled Longbowman vs Crossbowman: Hundred Years’ War 1337–60, even though it was a short Osprey book. Since it was only 8 dollars, I purchased a copy and finished it this morning.

Allow me to ask a question: when you see the title "Longbowman vs Crossbowman", would you expect some sources that deal with the crossbow as a weapon? Would you expect some brief discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of the different weapons?

If so, you would be wrong. Ralph Payne-Gallwey, Josef Alm and W.F. Patterson, the three single most important English language sources on crossbows do not feature in the text or the bibliography. Similarly, there is no mention of experiments regarding efficiency and spanning times performed by Tod Todeschini on reproduction steel lathe crossbows, or the experiments with regard to range and armour penetration performed by Andreas Bichler with composite lathe crossbows.

This results in a puzzling description of 14th century crossbow bolts as "light". There were indeed some crossbow bolts as light as 40 grams, but that was the lower end for the lightest bolts, which ranged between 40 and 49 grams. The flight arrows of the English would have fallen in this same range, while the standard war arrows (generally accepted to have LM Type 16/Jessop M4 arrowheads) would have weighed under 55 grams. Meanwhile, large numbers of quarrels fell in the 60-69 and 70-79 gram range, varying by the type and weight of the heads. David Campbell also believes the crossbow to have had a significantly lower accurate range than the longbow which given their similarities in arrow weight and range, I disagree with.

Campbell also falls into the camp of the 140lb longbow in the 14th century. There are a number of reasons why I don't believe in this concept (armour design in Britain, lack of professionalisation prior to the HYW, the primary use of bows by most who owned them, etc), and I find Mike Loades' contention that bows didn't draw more than 120lbs in the period under discussion more convincing.

Now, I will acknowledge that any discussion on longbows and crossbows in this period needs to focus on the differences in deployment and examine differences in army structure, morale and training and experience. The difference between the longbow and the crossbow alone cannot explain the English victories or the French defeats, and so much of the text is rightly dedicated to examining the many reasons why the English so often defeated the French.

In this latter endeavour, Campbell does as well as could be expected in such a short book. Some nuance is missed, such as Charles of Blois significantly bolstering his missile arm, the use of flanking cavalry attacks and attempts at engaging the English where there were no natural defences, but it is nonetheless a good summary. He does miss the chance in the main text to point out that even with similar numbers the crossbowmen were still outmatched by the English at Poitiers on account of the differences in discharge times, but catches it in the analysis.

Overall, the book is an adequate summary of the factors at play on both sides of the early Hundred Years War, but it has a number of errors when it comes to crossbows, and Campbell has not critically analysed the conclusions of Strickland and Hardy regarding the draw weight of the longbow in this period. As the subject of the book implies discussion of the merits of each weapon, which it does not do to any great degree - thought perhaps this may have avoided the "peasant with a crossbow" cliche - I would argue that the book is inherently flawed and does not live up to the promise of the title.

Had Longbowman vs Crossbowman: Hundred Years’ War 1337–60 been titled instead English vs French: Hundred Years’ War 1337–60, I would rate it 3/5. It is a basic, but adequate, examination of the tactics and evolution of the English and French armies during this period. However, that is not the title and so I rate it as 2/5: not worthless, but it contains some easy to disprove misinformation and the title is misleading.

This is "going to read" rather than "been reading", but at my museum's used book sale this weekend, I picked up:

Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom's Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (signed by the author!)

Charlotte Wilcoxen, Seventeenth Century Albany: A Dutch Profile

Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in New York City, 1664-1730

Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism

Michael Foster and Barbara Foster, A Dangerous Woman: The Life, Loves, and Scandals of Adah Isaacs Menken, 1835-1868, America's Original Superstar

John Van Der Zee, Bound Over: Indentured Servitude & American Conscience

Living in a university town has its advantages.

Freedom and Slavery: An Interpretation of the Old South went in the can Monday night. I appreciated the quick read and it's by no means bad, but Oakes is deeply interested in the question of whether slavery was capitalistic and gets into fine-grain details of how it's a hybrid. If I thought that was an important question, and had I been at this in the Eighties or Nineties I might have, I bet it would be riveting. I think he wrote a good book that ends up lost in technical distinctions that don't actually tell us much, but I do appreciate him as a little ahead of his time in aggressively situating in the South in the American and Atlantic contexts. A lot of less recent Southern history fails to do that, or argues that the region just is fundamentally alien.

I've moved on from there to the first of my summer reading program books: Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South by Bertram Wyatt-Brown. At about halfway through, I'm not sure how much of his argument I'm just missing and how much is stuff I already kinda-sorta had from reading subsequent works and am looking too hard at. I like the book well enough, all the same. Wyatt-Brown has a touch of the defensiveness one sometimes sees of southern historians of his generation or two and his Lee worship is a bit tedious, but so it goes. I get the sense that one or both of his subsequent works on honor would be closer to my interests than this one. Shame on him for not writing in order of my preferences. I was two at the time and that's old enough to want pandering.

After that, almost all my list is in. Just waiting on Eugene Genovese to show up. The rest:

The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth Stampp

North of Slavery by Leon Litwack

The Frontier Against Slavery by Eugene Berwanger, a surprise addition I literally bought in an insane asylum.

Slaves Without Masters by Ira Berlin

American Slavery by Peter Kolchin

I think I'm going to take them in that order, but I may read Litwack and Berlin back to back to capture more of the free black experience in one go. All of this plus Genovese should keep me going well into September.

I finally sat down to fully read the first chapter of a book I'd ordered from the library a while ago. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar by Akiko Takenaka. Now, I'd got the book for the first chapter which is about my biggest area of interest: the Bakumatsu and the Boshin war, but the entire book seems like it'll be a great read for understanding a very thorny issue.

Yasukuni Shrine's controversy today is in its enshrining of Class A War criminals and the apologetics of the shrine and the museum for Japanese nationalist history. But its early history is pretty troubled as well. It enshrined the dead of one side in the Boshin War: the victorious Imperial side, while at the same time, the dead of the opposing side in Aizu were refused burial for five months, the bodies left to rot and stink in the open. When peasants tried to bury the bodies, the Imperial army dug them up again. When the permission was at last given to bury the bodies, they were tipped into mass graves, and the Imperial army destroyed the shrine and markers that were erected over them.

This ugly episode is mentioned in other books but Takenaka's given the most details of any English-language writer, and explores the two posthumous experiences of Boshin war dead: enshrined in Yasukuni vs. refused burial/memorialization, as two sides of the new state's move towards controlling the narrative of death in war, and taking away the dead from their families, who had in early centuries always been the ones who controlled how they honoured and grieved their own dead.

I'm looking forward to seeing how she develops the theme with the unfolding history of Yasukuni in future chapters.

Hello,

I'm here to request aid in the search for books regarding a few different topics. Little context before I go further: I enjoy writing and drawing and have a passion for history, and I've been wanting to combine the three into one hobby, which has manifested as the project of creating a low-fantasy, steampunk, heavily historically inspired world.

For the purpose of making this world more authentic, sophisticated and giving in more nuance, I need to widen my historical understanding created by school, documentaries and wikipedia. Therefore, I'm looking for help finding very analytical, professional and advanced books by professors and experts for the following subjects:

17th-19th Century Societies of European countries like Britain, France or German regions (what moved people, how did they see the world, their political view, stuff like that)

The Enlightenment and its protagonists

Technological advancement during the Industrial Revolution, or something on the Industrial Revolution across Europe and the Industrial Age itself.

A good, detailed book (or probably a series of books, that'd be the only thing to do it justice) about the French Revolution.

Britain before and during the Industrial Revolution, something looking at the British Empire as a whole would be nice, too.

The Colonialisation of the Americas

Something going into detail about the history of the British Royal Navy and how it operated.

The Napoleonic Wars.

Furthermore, a few recommendations for books written by British authors alive in those times, such as Charles Dickens, to give it little more flavour would be appreciated.

This is probably a lot and I don't expect anyone to give me a full list for every subject, but if you have any one book you can recommend that sheds light into one of them, I would already be very thankful for that.

I just ordered the Doctrine of Fascism by Mussolini but is there any other key texts that detail the reasoning of the ideology and philosophy of Fascism (¿Classical Fascism?)

Anyone know of a good book on the America Civil War?