I'm broadly researching the African American experience in the Wilmington N.C. area. I am an intern at Fort Fisher State Historic Site, so my research anchors around Ft. Fisher and Federal Point, but extends to the local area. This project spans from (roughly) 1800 - 1950s.

If anyone has books or article suggestions on African American history pertaining to North Carolina/Wilmington slavery, post-Civil War reconstruction of the area, or about race relations post-Civil War through the Jim Crow era, I would love to expand my background knowledge!

I was traveling in Japan recently and it got me thinking about some of Japan's recent history. I'm particularly interested in Japan's massive economic development in the 1970s and 1980s and people's attitudes toward it. I'd expect some pearl-clutching on the part of the US, but I don't know as much about how Europe, China, or the USSR saw it. And what about the Japanese themselves? Does anyone know of any sources that bring together these kinds of perspectives, or where I could go looking for them?

Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll was a thing, all right. The most generous possible reading is that Genovese believes there's a dynamic tension between enslavers and enslaved. The enslaved always want to better their condition and will resist to do so. The enslavers always want to reduce them to automatons and will engage in horrific violence to do so. But neither can achieve absolute dominance, so the struggle goes on.

That's fine. The problem is that Genovese doesn't clearly understand this as a tension so much as a mutual concord, which he calls paternalism. His thumb is reliably on the scale, with page on page on page about how the enslavers regarded their slaves as people and treated them well, or if not that then at least not as horribly as imagined, and in turn the enslaved felt some kind of gratitude and obligation toward them. That's a position I think you can only sustain by looking at things from a purely white POV, so Genovese undertakes the heroic task of doing just that. Horrors come up only to mitigate them, almost in a token gesture.

We have a diverse sources for enslaver thought about the enslaved. They span a fair amount of time and space, though neither of those is a priority for Genovese. Testimony from the enslaved is limited and almost exclusively from the WPA narratives. Genovese knows full well that these are the recollections of people who were children and teenagers during slavery, decades later, given to white interviewers in the Jim Crow South. The issues are tremendous enough that one could reasonably exclude them entirely, though that might be an overabundance of caution. Contemporary slave testimony is limited to rare quotes from Frederick Douglass (and notably few of those about violence) and Solomon Northrup.

The good is that Genovese wrote a sweeping, damned near comprehensive book. There's a lot of decent information inside it. His argument, however, ranges from bad to abhorrent. Taken as a whole, the book is close to an outright apologetic for the enslaver regime. I don't know if he did that consciously or not, but the more I read it the more I thought he had. It's not like he didn't have many more contemporary narratives available to him. Excluding them and including the WPA stuff is a choice and in a prior work Genovese admits that he honestly admirers the enslavers. He reads like as close to UB Phillips as you can get in the Seventies and still get published.

So that's done. From twitter I learned about Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 on Twitter and I've picked it up. The ebook was really cheap. It's been a little bit of a slog so far. Lots of good information and decent argument but I don't feel like I'm making much progress with it despite being halfway through. The basic argument is that slavery was central to the Texas Revolution, which is one of those things I consider just crushingly obvious but I understand has been largely denied in arguments that have a lot in common with the ones you hear about the Civil War.

Been reading Jay Taylor's biography of Chiang Kai-Shek. It is a very interesting and detailed work, and certainly presents a much more nuanced image of the man and the regime he ruled than a lot of works. It makes me want to read more biographies of some of his Chinese contemporaries, if any of you know of any good biographies I would appreciate recommendations, particularly interested in regards to the "warlords" and the soong family. Was also going to purchase Jay Taylor's biography of Chiang Ching-Kuo, but I cannot seem find it at a reasonable price.

Recommendations request.

I'm going on a Mediterranean cruise this fall, Rome, Israel, Rhodes, Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Mallorca and Barcelona, what are good reads for a lay person, any time period pre-history through renaissance?

Thank you!

Reading more chronicles of the Northwest campaign in the War of 1812, this time Views of the Campaigns of the North Western Army by Samuel Brown, published in 1816. All pretty standard in comparison to other contemporary chronicles, but I did find an interesting mention of a company of free blacks [emphasis original] in the Michigan militia:

However, 600 of the territorial militia rallied under [Hull's] standard, among whom, were one company of free blacks, mostly renegadoes from Kentucky.

This is the first I've heard of a company of black militia, but I'm very interested in following it up! Many of the other chroniclers make a point to say that the militia of Michigan were francophone, and were nearly indistinguishable from their Canadian counterparts. As such they already had a reputation as being half-wild and rather foreign in comparison to the Ohio militia.

Could anyone recommend any good books about Ludwig II of Bavaria?

Is there a modern translation or study of Al Beruni's Tarikh Al Hind? I am reading a 100 year old translation that is available on Columbia University - I plan to write a series of blog posts detailing my learnings. But I would love to read other perspectives as well.