Polished off To Purge The Land in Blood. Feelings about John Brown were had. I gave up on the David McReynolds biography as being a bit too uncritical. It's not awful, but especially after reading some of Oates I felt like he was trying too hard to be Brown's advocate. On the balance, Oates clearly likes the guy too but he doesn't make wild claims like how Brown is perfectly innocent of racism. I read the last chapter of Oates in public, which almost got a bit awkward:

I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia; (I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d; I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)

From there, it's straight into poor emotional self-care history times. I've started Terri Snyder's The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America. I was going to read her journal article first but got distracted so I only read the first few pages. A story she told there prompted brief dialog with a friend:

Me: You know I just read this really moving thing about slavery and suicide-

Him: And I don't need to hear about it.

Fair. I've given him accidental nightmares often enough.

I raided the Museum of London's online collection looking for arrowheads and found that very few of them have any measurement other than length and weight. External socket diameter, the most important measurement for me, was missing for most of their collection. Only 16 out of 122 arrowheads had an external socket diameter, and only three of these had diameters of 11mm or more. At 6, the 9mm diameter is the most common diameter, with the remaining being four 10mm diameter and three 8mm diameter arrowheads.

A quick look at the online catalogues of other museums suggests that socket diameters are similarly missing from most of their arrowheads. The Portable Antiquities Scheme looks much more promising, with a scale being provided even if the diameter isn't. Unfortunately, the finds aren't really datable beyond a century or two.

At this point, I think the best bet is to try and track down all of Jessop's source and hope most of them will be in the National Library. After that, I'll need to see if there are any newer archaeological reports with arrowheads and then think about making a trip to England to go and measure some arrowheads. With my on and off research style, the distances involved and my other project with the Mary Rose longbows, it might take me a couple of years to get all the data. Then I can see whether I've altered the traditional narrative or reinforced it.

Does anyone have any knowledge of a history of the German army and it’s actions similar to the US’s Green Books? Additionally any German war memoirs or collections of memoirs from soldiers based around the Siegfried Line during the First Army’s campaign there from September-December 1944. I’m in the early stages of an attempt to put together a book related to the fighting in the Hürtgen Forest and would like to include a representation of the German point of view but don’t know where to find the material.

Hello! I've recently finished The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson. I was curious if anyone knew any books of similar depth on the Italian Wars of the late 15th and early 16th century?

Just finished Wells The Origins of the Southern Middle Class. Not sure where I stand with it.

On one side, I fully agree that there was near constant exchange of people and information between North and South throughout the antebellum period. And he does make a compelling argument that these non-planters aims for modernizing the South forced more political involvement from planters and accelerated political confrontation in D.C.

But I honestly have a hard time viewing them as the equivalent of an industrialized middle class - and see little value in classifying them as such. They were never completely divorced from the planter class, and still required their investment in capital.

Ultimately I think he is overstating their impact, if not their existence, by 1861. That's not to say another 10 years would not have seen a difference, but by then it was a moot point anyway.

Ok, I'm requesting a book on a particular subject: Abe Lincoln. Yes, I know there is an enormous number of there. I'm looking for a political biography, I don't need every last detail about childhood, marriage etc. I'm not afraid of long (even multi-volume is fine) but at least a tincture of literary style would be nice. Old is also ok, but solid scholarship is a must. Thanks much!

I'll try asking for a recommendation here. I've heard a lot of different numbers about the gulag system's death toll, the number killed in the famine in Ukraine, and the numbers killed in Stalin's purges. I remember reading an LRB article by Getty which seemed to argue that the Great Purge death toll was 31,000, but I do not think that is true.

So, is there a good modern book (I guess handbook) that goes into detail on the death tolls under Stalin and that cites relevant research. And that weighs in on the question of whether the Ukrainian famine (which I've heard estimates of killing anywhere between 1-10 million people) was a genocide.

I'm reading Ivan's War, by Catherine Merridale, on the recommendation of a friend (it's a long story but I'm working on historical fiction about youth movements during World War II). I've only finished the first chapter. I grew up during the Cold War and I didn't really understand before that the Soviet Union wasn't always cynical; the people believed that they were building a socialist utopia, which is portrayed an awful lot like the Nazi utopia. They thought that fighting the war was not only going to bring good things to them, it might trigger communist revolutions in other countries.