Recently, I went back to Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860, by C. Dallett Hemphill. I had put it down a while ago, it's a bit dry, but I've come back renewed and ready to learn about the changes in expectations of women in the public space during the American Revolution!

More excitingly, today I ordered The Queen's Servants and The King's Servants - two books on men's and women's clothing in England, 1485-1520, specifically focusing on ordinary people rather than royalty and nobility. I'm planning to get involved with the SCA, and this is my preferred period. They will, I expect, also prove very useful for answering questions about medieval clothing.

Has anyone read this? Is it a good book? 14-18: Understanding the Great War by Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau

After /u/Bentresh recommended Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History edited by Anne Walthall in a thread, I went and read the chapter on the shogun's women's quarters (of course) and on Versailles.

The Versailles chapter: "Women of Versailles, 1682-1789 "by Kathryn Norberg is really interesting, beginning with a very paradoxical opening assertion:

Versailles is one of the most written about palaces on earth, but we know more about the women of the palace at Edo or Aceh than we do about the ladies of Louis XIV's chateau.' To be sure, we know the French women's names: Madame de Maintenon, the marquise de Pompadour, and Marie-Antoinette. We even know a great deal about their lives: biographies of individual women, especially royal mistresses, fill the library shelves. Nor are primary sources wanting. Contemporary observers such as Saint-Simon and Primi Visconti filled their memoirs with portraits of duchesses, ladies-in-waiting, and (of course) royal mistresses.

Still, we cannot say (as we can for the Asian palaces) how many women lived or worked in Versailles, how they were recruited, why they came to the court, how their lives and their life chances differed from those of men—in short, how their sex determined their destiny. The place of gender in Bourbon strategies of domination has not been analyzed. Only one work approximates a serious study of the women of Versailles and it too espouses the biographical approach. Open the index of books on Versailles and you will find no entries for "gender" or "masculinity." Even the rubric "women" is absent. (p. 191)

To the extent that "knowing about" is defined in her second paragraph, that's a really interesting observation.

Though, from the Edo Castle side of things, I'd reply back that there is so much we don't know, for example we know the women of Edo Castle influenced shogunal politics but never the exact details. We don't know as much about the women of Edo Castle as individual human beings, even though we know a lot about their numbers and their ranks and duties and the system they worked within.

But this is probably a good way to get people thinking about the different sorts of "knowledge" about people of the past.

After a break for some fiction, I'm back in the history. Today I'm slated to finish The Wages of Whiteness, which is great. It's just about right for a book that's been so influential to things I've already read. I know the basic argument already, but there's still enough inside to flesh it out. The discussion of blackface has been especially helpful in firming up some of those things I had vague impressions of but hadn't quite put together.

I have no idea what I'll read after it, but Tise's Proslavery is likely. Possibly Dain's A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic or Jordan's White Over Black, but I'd like to read Jordan first and I don't have a copy yet and last I saw it was exp- And now it's not. I'm still not going to have it by tomorrow, but I've been putting it off too damned long because the ebook price is ridiculous. Probably Tise then.

I have been researching and trying to make sense of the most recent alleged faux pas by our president. Mostly "why NOW" after 8 years of an African American President and left leaning government when it comes to removing Confederate statues.

My gut says that many cities in the south are now quite liberal or left leaning and they have been opportunistic in removing any Confederate-honoring statues. That this is simply a deliberate protest against racist rhetoric. An example is one city removing them overnight when "no one was watching."

It has lead to this question:

When does it become accepted to remove or alter historical narrative? Some concentration camps of Germany remain to teach their atrocities. Are we seeing the narrative of the Confederacy being altered again to completely emphasize it's predominantly slave owning economy and throwing away any other argument for it's existence (that it was for state's rights, etc)?

What are some quality books/articles that could help better explain this? Left and right views welcome.

hello lovely historians! I am wondering if I might ask for some book recommendations here. I'm starting to propose a dissertation about the British empire & the welfare state since 1945, and how the labor of the former is used to develop the latter. but embarrassingly enough my understanding of development projects / the idea of "development" is actually very thin, especially in the British case. I unfortunately went through most of undergrad and so far all of graduate school not having taken actual coursework in British history.

I've read some work on France (ex., internal development covered in Peasants into Frenchmen and Creating the Nation in Provincial France, plus stuff like A Mission to Civilize for Senegal and French West Africa) and a little bit for Russia and Germany, and I've read a lot of work in the 1990s about British nursing as an arm of colonialism — but I still feel like I'm missing a lot and can't really offer a cohesive summary or explanation of development that I can use, especially as related to but distinct from civilizing missions. would anyone be able to perhaps point me in the right direction? I know this question is a bit all over the place so thank you in advance!