Last Sunday I sat down and read a book and something like 6 different journal articles (think I ended up only citing 2 of the articles) because a question about footnotes sparked my interest and I had a couple hunches.

At the start of my answer I mention that Anthony Grafton's book The Footnote: A Curious History has a lot of problems. So what are they?^1

The biggest issue is that he spends 2 whole chapters focused on Leopold Von Ranke. Regardless of how influential Ranke's handling of archive diving was, this is a ridiculous amount of space to focus on one guy at the very end of the footnote's development. Especially because much of those chapters didn't even really focus on how Ranke put together and used his footnotes. It seemed a lot of it was just focused on praising Ranke for revolutionizing archival studies, while occasionally offering some counterpoint by discussing some criticism of Ranke's methods. And then when he finally moves on from Ranke, Grafton mentions that maybe his methods weren't that revolutionary since Edward Gibbon and a couple other scholars had been doing similar archival diving almost a century prior (and had more interesting footnotes to boot).

Another weakness that I found with the book is that Grafton starts at the tail end of the development and works backwards then skips over the period immediately surrounding the development of the true footnote to discuss some precursors and then finally moves on to some early users of true footnotes. While this sort of skipping around and narrowing down isn't necessarily bad, it was really annoying when I was trying to assemble my answer. Being able to follow the leaps in time that Grafton made was not helped at all by the fact that it seemed somewhat rare for Grafton to mention specific years, so it was sometimes hard to tell what works being mentioned were younger or older.

Lastly, it seemed that there were times he referred to footnotes being used before the time period that he eventually established as the origin of footnotes. As always, it's possible (likely) that I misread or misinterpreted him. But if I didn't misread, he really should have done some more editing to clear up terminology.

Now, even with this criticism I thought the book was quite interesting. A bit digressive, especially in the early chapters, but ultimately I don't regret reading it.

1. Ok. I wasn't originally planning on including a note with this, but something to keep in mind with my criticisms: I read the book once. In a single sitting. While taking fairly extensive notes. For the sole purpose of researching the question asked here. If I had been reading it under different circumstances, I likely would not have been as bothered by these things.

So I'm calling to, well, everyone! As a few are aware, my goal these days is to compile an essentially complete bibliography of modern works which deal with dueling. I'm doing pretty well so far, with well over 100 books, and according to Mendeley, 373 journal articles/chapters from essay collections. But I continue to discover new things! Only last week I got my hands on:

Parker, David S. 2006. “‘Gentlemanly Responsibility’ and ‘Insults of a Woman’ Dueling and the Unwritten Rules of Public Life in Uruguay, 1860-1920.” In Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence, edited by William E. French and Katherine Elaine Bliss, 109–32. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

So anyways, I am calling on everyone to help me in my mission! Do you know of some out of print book from the '70s with a non-descript title, which just so happens to have a chapter about dueling? Let me know! Perhaps it is something I've missed.

The Peculiar Institution is all done. There are points where it shows its age, but overall holds up extremely well. The discussions of profitability (yes, why else would they keep doing it?) and southern expectations for slavery's diverse future (mining! industry!) are real stand outs.

My biggest criticism isn't really fair. Stampp calls it a history of slavery in the antebellum South, but he means antebellum in about the narrowest sense. There's little in the way of change over time. Rather he wrote a spotlight on Southern slavery in about its last twenty years, with occasional notes about prior eras. That's fine for the Fifties, or even for the Nineties, when the Antebellum is usually taken as the twenty years prior to the Civil War but looks weird in an era with a lot more work done on slavery's development and progress.

From there I started in on Berwanger's The Frontier Against Slavery and boy howdy is it dry. It's one of those books that might be better at twice the length, since so much of the evidence reduces easily to "and you can tell because they passed this law at this time" with notes about largely repetitive debates. It feels like the worst of a narrow, focused book and a general overview wrapped together. Fortunately it's short.

Realizing I had my summer reading lined up in advance and on notice from a friend that he would like to read Roll, Jordan, Roll with me, I decided to schedule my reading ahead of time. I've been doing a chapter a day for almost a year now, except Wednesdays when I do two. Just added another two chapter day for Saturdays and planned with the assumption of keeping it.

According to my timeline, I ought to have finished Stampp yesterday. Did that Thursday instead and got right into Berwanger. Haven't touched him yet today and I'm already two chapters ahead. I could take the day off and still be on track...but I'll probably read at least one and probably both of today's two. If that holds up, he'll be finished Monday and I'll start Litwack's North of Slavery Tuesday. The further I get ahead, the more likely I am to slip The Political Economy of Slavery in in front of Roll, Jordan, Roll so I have a little better idea where Genovese is coming from.

Does anyone know of a good book on the economy of the Late Roman Empire published after 1980, and a good book on the economy of High and/or Late Medieval Europe? I'm looking for something larger and more detailed than A Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe by Steven A. Epstein.

Long story short, I'm reading Norman Pounds An Economic History of Medieval Europe as part of my "Ten History Books Fsntasy Authors Should Read" project. While it's recommended by the Oxford Bibliography, it is a fair bit out of date and I want to see what qualifications I need to make when writing up that section of the article.

My other research this week has been some background reading on medieval archery. It started with Medieval Arrowheads From Oxfordshire, an article by Richard Wadge on 13th-15th century arrowheads found in non-military contexts in Oxfordshire. Wadge examined the finds and places them in their contexts so that a clear picture of who used which heads emerged. Three of the five LMMC Type 16/Jessop M4 arrowheads had sockets for a shaft much thinner than typically associated with war arrows and were not found near a manor. Of the hunting and larger multipurpose arrowheads, most were found near a manor, where one would expect men whose professions required the use of heavy bows to live. Better than half the multipurpose heads, however, were under 10mm in diamater.

After this I checked the diamater at the shoulder for the Westminster Arrow to make sure that some of the smaller sockets didn't belong to barrelled shafts. There seems to be some confusion over the shoulder diameter, with 10 and 11mm being reported. I decided to go with Robert Hardy's examination, which suggested a 10mm diameter. Any of the Oxfordshire arrows with internal socket diameters under 10mm can be dismissed as belonging to bows with a draw weight under 100lbs, and quite probably under 80lbs, which was Wadge's conclusion.

Wadge came to the conclusion that most people didn't habitually use a heavy weight bow and that only those whose profession involved archery used such bows. While I agree with this in the 13th century - Wadge's Archery in Medieval England: Who Were the Bowmen of Crecy? has established that a variety of bows 5 feet in length or less existed in the 13th and early 14th century - I'm unsure how far this can be applied to the 14th century. Certainly they were in use in 1314 because we have a court case where a 1.37m bow "called Turkeys" was allegedly used in a murder, but it seems to have been the outlier and all other bows allegedly used were 1.8m or longer. The Luttrell Psalter also shows a mix of bow lengths. Finally, the Oxford multipurpose arrowheads were undated, but the designs mean they could date from the mid 13th century or earlier.

So, there's really not much evidence on what kind of bows ordinary people were using around the time of Crécy. Moreover, even if people were using longbows exclusively, that doesn't mean the longbows had more than a 100lb draw weight. Bergman et. al. tested an 80lb longbow in Experimental archery: projectile velocities and comparison of bow performances, and it achieved a velocity of 51 m/s with a 65g arrow. No range was given but, based on tests in Robert Hardy's The Longbow and Hardy and Strickland's The Great Warbow, I would expect a range of at least 200 yards, which is well within the bounds of historical "bowshot" ranges. The accuracy wouldn't be particularly good, but the same bow could be used for hunting or for war, and could use the same arrows as much heavier bows.

This all leads me to wonder if the shift from the archer having to supply their own bow and arrows to the Crown supplying both was what institutionalised longbows and increased draw weights initially, not any commands to practice archery or need to penetrate armour (the English didn't face much heavy armour until the HYW). And I can't help but think that the shift in bow supply was initially about logistics and organisation, not increasing the range or power of the bows significantly. Because, if most people were used to lighter bows, the time it would take to train them up to the 140lb bows some authors envision as standard at Crécy would exceed the length of several campaigns.

Anyway, it's something for me to look at more closely in the future.

This week I came across Keith Mason's article on Absentee Planters in the Caribbean and it reinvigorated my search for local merchants who had acquired plantations and slaves in the Caribbean. The results were better than I hoped for.

The first thing I turned up was an article on the son of another wealthy merchant and shipbuilding family, who had acquired large plantations in Virginia, Barbados, and Guyana in the decades before the American Revolution.

A trend was arising, and it dawned on me that I was on a good clip to complete my research paper by my September deadline. But then I turned to the local archive's finding aids.

And uncovered two more merchants, a father and son, who purchased a cotton plantation in S.Carolina(1861) and 3 more in Louisianna (1864) respectively.

And so, combined with the FIL/son connection I had previously, I now have a firmly established long-term trend of New England merchant families attempting vertical integration - a long ways off from the common belief that they merely traded the products of slave labor.

Does anyone know of a book that details the settling and exploration of the Missouri-Arkansas Ozarks region? Or any general history of the region? I've read a book with pictures from around the time of the building of Bagnell Dam on Lake of the Ozarks, but a more in-depth history of the region would be really interesting.

I'm sure this is a very niche query, but I'm not sure where else to ask, other than a local library. Thanks.

Am so deep into Totman's Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu that I've hit the fatal point of making jokes no one else understands, and laughing to myself over them.

Currently plotting my Bakumatsu history sitcom where the Shogunate and the Imperial Court are a mismatched married couple who are staying together for the sake of the kids: the domains.