I've just taken my last exams for my BA in History, and I'm beginning to research the history of Passion Week and Christology.

I'm planning to use the Bible as a primary source, and am also looking for other good secondary sources.

My interest is in debates over God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit.

Any help in decent overview sources would be appreciated, or specific ones focusing on the emergence and change of this concept.

Thank you!

Recently finished Claudia Koonz The Nazi Conscience.

Extremely well written and offers some really valuable knowledge of the rise of Nazism and the appeal of populist ethno-nationalism. I'd be lying if I said it hasn't given me plenty to think on over the past couple weeks.

Couple more books finished this week:

• Tsereteli – A Democrat in the Russian Revolution: A Political Biography by W.H. Roobol (1976): This is about Irakli Tsereteli, a Georgian Menshevik and one of the leading figures of the Petrograd Soviet during the Russian Revolution. As the title suggests, its not a real biography but a political one, looking at his career from his early life until he faded out of the public eye in the 1930s. Translated from the original Dutch, it is the only biography of Tsereteli out there, which isn't surprising as he's not exactly well-known these days. However he was a major figure in 1917: a renown public speaker, he was called the "conscience of the revolution" by Lenin. Tsereteli, as Roobol argues, didn't want to acquire power, and was stridently against any conflict that could end the revolution before the proletariat could properly act, which may have been his downfall. It casts him as an idealist, who tried to find compromises, but was unable to harness his own popularity and influence to enact much lasting change, and thus faded into obscurity. I first read parts of the book years ago during my MA, when I wrote a paper questioning the importance of Tsereteli (he dismissed the Bolsheviks as weak and not a threat weeks before they took power), and finally got round to reading the whole thing. Really interesting book, really dives into the divides between the various socialist blocks in Russia at the time.

• The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists by Tarik Cyril Amar (2015): This is a misleading title, as I thought it was more about interwar Lviv. Instead Amar looks at how the Soviet authorities "Sovietized" and "Ukrainianized" the city in the aftermath of the war, and how the initial Soviet (1939-41) and Nazi (1941-44) occupations impacted that. It was still interesting, as it looks at the city in the immediate post-war era (largely in the 1940s and 1950s), and how the Soviets kind of had a test city to try out things, even though they had the uncomfortable issue of dealing with the Polish and Jewish populations (which as he notes, the Nazis helped deal with). It has a neat section on Soviet historiography as well, in how they had to incorporate a communist history in a region that was part of bourgeois Austria-Hungary and then Poland (and thus no Bolshevik impact), as well as showing that the east-west divide in Ukraine was very important then, as it is now.

I think I've missed a while here. Finished up Slavery & Social Death, which I got a tremendous amount out of but was not a great reading experience. Afterwards I got into Arn't I A Woman?. The last time I read a book specifically about women's history was in high school when I was not cognitively equipped. This was so much better. The chapter on the life cycle of an enslaved woman was a real highlight. It was a bit weird to see Harriet Jacobs referred to consistently by her pseudonym, though. Guessing there was some shift in how she's normally referred to between then and now.

From that I've started up A Hideous Monster of the Mind, all about race theory in the early Republic. Even without the Foucault quote, you could tell who he was referencing by how the quality of prose went right to the toilet and stayed there for a page or two to either side. For all I know, Foucault is perfectly lucid in French but everything I've read of him in translation -my French is nowhere near good enough- is maddeningly opaque, comes off as endless ranting, or maddeningly opaque endless ranting. And I say this as a guy who finds some postmodern ideas genuinely essential.

The book itself is ok so far, but the author already made one strange choice. He presented Jefferson's racial thought as a reaction against some European thought and part of a dialog with it. We find out almost all of Jefferson's response in great detail before we get more than a paragraph or so of the other side. Which then gets its own section. I know it's a book about American thought, but c'mon...

I need a source for a piece of course work on uprisings in america in the 19th century. I already have a source from Harpers weekly about the raid on harpers ferry, but I would like to have one with a contrasting view point to compare it with. Thanks for any help.

Earlier this week, I was reviewing the debate over the role of race in inciting American atrocities in the Pacific War. In "Race and Identity: The Culture of Combat in the Pacific War," Craig Cameron delivers an entertaining rebuttal to John Lynn's pushback in Battle against his own and John Dower's arguments which enshrined race as primary factors in American combat brutality.

I just wanted to share one of Cameron's better lines:

Lynn supposes that "American bombers ... did help to fight the Japanese in China." The first mass incendiary bombing by B-29s in Asia hit not Japan but the Chinese port city of Hankow, December 1944. This was a form of help the Chinese could have done without.

Hi all, I have a query about the AskHistorians booklist.

The section on Australian history, imo, is very short - and somewhat lopsided. There are 10 books on the list - 3 of which are written as a trilogy (by a non-historian) - and 4 of which are on the Federation period alone. Furthermore, there are some pretty striking absences here. A lot of topics which are greatly important for an overview or introduction to Australian history are simply not present.

There are no books that focus on Indigenous Australians. Meaning that the entire book list as a whole has nothing that focuses on that entire extraordinarily rich, well-studied and valuable segment of world history and culture.

The 'History Wars' are also not present. Frontier conflict, blackbirding, immigration and early race relations are absent. Neither are any works that focus on the 'White Australia' period.

Aside from Indigenous peoples, the experiences of Australia's other major historical minority groups, Asian-Australians and South Sea Islanders, also aren't present. The book list is also regionally poor, Australia's different regions had very different experiences of pre-federation history. It would be worth having works that focus on Van Dieman's Land/Tasmania, West Australia, Queensland, etc.

Neither are any of the works of gender history that have been written about Australian history present.

If it would be okay with the moderators - I would like to recommend several additions to that section of the book list to address these absences.

I'm in the middle of Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of An Empire. I gather that his thesis is that plagues (imperial trade routes hence transmission) and climate changes (less insolation hence cooler temperatures, changing rainfall patterns hence drought) are well-established in the historical record, and were a much larger contribution to Roman decline than people have realized.

In general, how well-regarded is it? Have there been rebuttals?

More specifically, maybe I've been overlooking how he addressed this: how does he connect the disasters to the decline of Romania? For example, for plague, if Roman imperial trade routes helped spread plague, then why didn't Persian imperial trade routes spread plague there, so that the Persians wouldn't have been able to take advantage of the plague of Cyprian, or also hit the barbarians (trading over the frontiers) to some extent? (Or if the barbarians were too scattered to be affected, why were rural Romans affected?) For drought and dearth: the Central Asians didn't have the resources of Egypt, North Africa, or other places in the empire, so why didn't a lot of them starve to death before they could get close enough to do damage?

He refers to changing consensus on some points. The one I remember is that the Crisis of the Third Century has been shrunk in time; the period before (Septimus Severus et seq) is now regarded as having continuity with the previous period; the period after is seen as astonishing recovery. Is he accurate in relating changing consensuses?