I've asked this before but I will again. Peter Hagendorf was a soldier in the Thirty Years' War who kept a famous diary of his service that seems very unique but I'm completely unable to find any English translation of it anywhere either online or in print. Do any Thirty Years' War experts know where I could find this?

I finished up Zilversmit's The First Emancipation, which was both really good and really short. He has that kind of old school -even a little for the time- attitude where he presents a lot of chunky facts. It makes for quick reading and it's not too dry, but it does make him feel a touch light and poppy by modern standards. In his defense, it's got to be hard to do otherwise with a multistate survey unless you go for Michael Holt tediously repetitious for little gain. Structurally, he suffers a little from trying to do chronological chapters and also follow each state through to the end. One essay will take you up to 1799 and then you start the next back in 1770. But if he'd written the book with a series of chapters Abolition in X, I'd be here saying that he should have done it the other way around. I'm terrible that way.

From there I picked up Larry Koger's Black Slaveowners: Free Black Masters in South Carolina. It was going really well until a road trip and then a Lego coma knocked me out. Should be back with it today.

The varied rounds of internet sniping last fourth of July left me wanting to read a contrarian take on the American Revolution. With the caveat that I would like it to be on Audible for money and time reasons, I have narrowed it down to American Revolutions by Alan Taylor and Autumn of the Black Snake by William Hogeland (the latter specifically about post-Revolutionary frontier conflicts). Anyone have any familiarity with these two books (or authors) or another suggestion?

What are some good books on the Reconquista?