Masterless Men. That was a thing. It felt like a book by a labor historian who didn't have enough background with the US South. The social history of the desperately poor in the late Antebellum isn't bad. The rest of it isn't good. Objections to her thesis are basically not dealt with at all, despite being acknowledged.

But Arthur Zilversmit's The First Emancipation is off to a good start. It's a little barebones by modern standards -not even 300 pages for a survey work- and a lot of it so far has been stuff I already picked up from reading things that cite him but I'm getting stuff out of it. I think I may be in love with a wild Quaker guy who protested slavery with theatrical direct action in the early eighteenth century. This was before the denomination had settled firmly on the antislavery stand they're famous for, so his career is 90% trolling them.

So I'm reading an article by Vasili Byros called "Meyer's Anvil: Revisiting the Schema Concept." It's an interesting article that argues that by understanding how specific conventional musical gestures of a time period work, we gain [partial] access to historically contingent ways of hearing that music. In particular, he traces two strands of reception history regarding how to interpret this weird, 5-second moment at the outset of Beethoven's Third Symphony, showing that an early strain of reception that interprets this moment as a sudden swerve into G minor declines precisely because the stylistic gestures that cue that interpretation fade from currency. So people begin to normalize that moment according to their own codes, which produces a different understanding of what's going on there. So by closely studying such gestures, we can better situate pieces against the historically contingent norms (and to be able to perform such acts in real time as we listen). It's an extension of work in the field of music analysis that is really trying to take the meaning of musical conventions seriously, and is more explicitly an extension of Robert Gjerdingen's wonderful book, Music in the Galant Style.

Anyways, completely unrelated, but does anyone know of work that studies the intertextuality amongst paintings of commonplace Christian iconography (ie. annunciations or pietas?). That is, something that asks a question like "what kind of artistic constraints did an artist accept when choosing one of these subjects?" Or "how did people read various realizations of these commonplace subjects against one another?" or "What kind of acts of judging (or maybe something "non-artistic" having to do with religious ritual or something) does that sort of artistic tradition facilitate?"

I've been trying to read The art of sea-fighting but I had to stop several pages through because I'm unable to understand and translate Old English.

Are there any historians that are able to translate it into modern day English? Because this book seems like a treasure for 18th century naval warfare enthusiasts like myself, and I think there's a lot of other people that would enjoy reading a modern translated version of it.

If anyone does have the time, I would be very grateful. I can wait for as long as it takes.

I got a review copy of Steve Coll's new book Directorate S and it's awesome.

I'm still banging away, trying to get a grip so I can answer a question on the Battle of Hastings from a few weeks ago. I had a slow week this week, only managing to make it through Behind the Shieldwall, by Jordan Poss. Despite being the most related the question I want to answer (which was on how the men actually fought), it seems lacking. There was no real examination of Anglo-Saxon literature to see how they portrayed war, no question of how being armoured or unarmoured might have changed levels of fear or bravery and there wasn't much of a look at how the fighting was conducted in order to determine how that altered the psychology of the fight. It all seems very derivative of Keegan.

Now, there's nothing wrong with John Keegan. He's been very valuable in shaping our understanding of the human factors of war and, though I strongly disagree with some of his conclusions, a lot of what he has to say is a lot more nuanced than many of his adherents manage to convey (a common problem, I find, that effects critics equally). My issue is that Poss hasn't added anything much to the Keeganist philosophy of warfare and I don't he manages to synthesise anything new when he adds Hanson to the mix as well.

Reading the thesis and seeing the references to Hanson and hoplite warfare has made me realise something, though: traditional hoplite warfare has nothing to do with Early Medieval shield walls. The design of the shields are all wrong: the boss makes pushing the man in front/pushing on the man in front difficult, if not outright impossible, while the thinness and fragility of the shields when used defensively in a static shield wall makes it less of a good idea to just lock shields and hack away at each other.

This is annoying, because as far as I know no one has studied the dynamics of medieval infantry battles the way Greek hoplites have been studied. I had been hoping to loot that research for information, but I may need to start from square one.

Most papers I know of skirt over how much effect the Fujimori gov had on capturing Guzman and curbing terrorism in Perú. They either mention it in passing that Fujimori didn't know about the operation, that it was normal detective work so his repressive measures didn't really help much, OR they gushingly credit him for everything without reason. Never is the issue discussed for more than a sentence, in a way that really goes in depth about funding and the actual state of things since the autocoup, or footnoted etc.

Are there any papers I can't find that specifically ask this question? Spanish is fine.

Still making my way through Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica edited by Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk. This is really a great book to read after reading Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall.