I've picked up the Ruth Goodman How to be a Victorian/Tudor books, because I've seen people use them as sources or just recommend them many times.

On the whole, the Victorian book seems pretty good, although there's sometimes a tendency to take satires and advice manuals at face value as descriptions of behavior. For instance, "many young men [before and at the beginning of the Victorian period] wore corsets to achieve the tiny waist then so fashionable for men." We have no idea how common male corsetry was! There are a lot of cartoons showing it, which could mean making fun of a common practice or that there was a lot of cultural anxiety about the ideal male figure having a small waist, a stereotypically feminine thing. In the section about corsets (which, I want to stress, is generally decent), Goodman takes a fetish story about tightlacing as a non-fictional document:

There is one frequently quoted letter to a women’s magazine that sums up the worst excesses of the practice, written by a woman who had not only gone through the experience but was perfectly happy to have done so: ‘I was placed at the age of fifteen at a fashionable school in London, and there it was the custom for the waists of pupils to be reduced one inch per month until they were what the lady principal considered small enough. When I left school at seventeen, my waist measured only thirteen inches, it formerly having been twenty-three inches in circumference.’ That this is no exaggeration is proved by the survival of a few of these tiny-waisted corsets.

Not real, not real, not real. I don't know what 13"-waisted adult women's corsets she's seen, because I've never come across them, and I suspect that where they exist they're samples for display. I would blame this on overuse of primary sources and an underuse of secondary ones (only the former are ever cited/quoted), but then too many secondary sources have taken these stories as fact. But she does eventually conclude that:

After a few days I found that I was able to be as vigorous in my corset and with my waist reduced by four inches as ever I was. I was soon charging around after escaped pigs and scrubbing floors, just as before.

For the most part, the sections on clothing, hair, and hygiene are accurate, if simplified and if containing a few things I would quibble with. And I can forgive her a lot for saying that you can't learn as much from wearing costumes made of modern materials and with modern techniques as you can from doing it yourself with documented, authentic methods and materials.

In other sections, I don't know as much and so have less quibbling, but it seems similarly good and similarly based mostly on primary sources. There are no citations to specific secondary sources throughout the text, and even the acknowledgements are mostly taken up with specific primary sources, followed by a list of modern historians Goodman is "indebted to". Altogether, I'm left with the concern that a lot of the specific data/statistics are potentially taken directly from Victorian newspapers without necessarily having been contextualized by historians of specific fields. (e.g. When Goodman states that "by 1862, between 130 and 150 tons of steel were being consumed each week by the crinoline trade," is this just a statistic some journalist threw out in 1862, or is this based on someone else's in-depth research into ledgers from a number of steel foundries?) Likewise, there are certain descriptions of processes (for instance, what order a woman would put on her clothing or how a barber would prepare and shave a client) that I know weren't or doubt were explained in primary sources, and I have to wonder if that's been sussed out by "common sense" or comparison to modern versions.

In sum, it's a good book if you want a broad overview of the Victorian era or information from an experienced reenactor as to what it feels like to wear this or do that. But please do not use it as a reference to answer questions here.

I wasn't even doing any deliberate research, but just 30 pages (plus intros and acknowledgements) into R. J. Smith's Mercenaries and Mandarins (1978), I've already noticed that his view of Frederick Townsend Ward is distinctly in opposition to Stephen Platt's in Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (2012). Where Platt paints a picture of Ward as just another filibuster, operating opportunistically and taking expedients like renouncing his citizenship and taking a Chinese wife to further his own cause, whilst basically an embarrassment to the Shanghai merchants, Smith's Ward genuinely 'goes native' and fosters a good working relationship with his superiors. Definitely a book to keep reading even just for more perspective on the 'Devil Soldier'.

Also, a few incidental bits and bobs. Apparently one of Ward's superiors was a man named Yung Fang who worked as an agent for Jardine Matheson and Co. Whilst I've always been aware of Jardine Matheson having sizeable influence in China, finding the reference has exposed just how little I actually know about British trade in China during the 19th Century. A further interesting tidbit comes in the acknowledgements, which include not only the Taiping scholar Jen Yu-Wen (a.k.a. Jian Youwen; author of The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (1973)) but also Peter Paret and B. H. Liddell Hart! Does anyone here have a bit more background on the connection?

I've finally got around to finishing Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face, which I used tentatively in an earlier response to a post -which I cannot for the life of me find- about Buddhist-Daoist interactions in Medieval China. I ended up skipping most of the textual analysis in order to use it in that post and was then sidetracked by other things and only had the chance to pick it up again recently. It is quite good, if somewhat brief, and provides a fascinating insight into the development of both Chinese Buddhism and Daoism into their present forms as well as providing a significant insight into the transmission and spread of Buddhism into China and the reinterpretation of Daoist ideas.

On another note, does anyone know any good resources focusing specifically on the development of Tiantai/Tendai and it's spread? I've found many resources on Ch'an and a few on Pure Land, but Tiantai seems difficult to find reliable information on, odd for something so important in the spread of Buddhism in the Sinosphere.

I think I've fallen off the wagon with checking in here weekly. Let's see if I can fix that. My two latest are The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and The Presidency of Franklin Pierce.

Problem is from the Sixties, but it's David Brion Davis so it's still pretty good. I was struck by how far he was willing to go with something that amounts to just tracing proslavery and antislavery thought. Every time he presents a new intellectual influence or movement, he does a great job of pointing out how it worked out to the advantage, at least to some degree, of both sides. That fits very well with how I tend to think of these things.

The Pierce book is one of a series that U-KS has been doing for ages now. It's a lovely, compact volume that fits nicely on the shelf. I enjoyed it and hated it, because I've spent a lot of time with Pierce's administration over the past few years. Stuff like the individual characters of most of his Cabinet I did not know, nor the maneuvering that went into his nomination and how everyone ended up in their places. The big issues were mostly not news because I've spent the time already. But that's complaining because the book wasn't written for me personally, which is unfair even if it's just obviously true that historians should come to my house, let me sit on their lap, and quiz them in perpetuity.

What I did come out of it with is a strong sense that if the rest of the series is remotely like this one, then they are an excellent first introduction to an administration. They're not Oxford Histories Of, but kind of in the same genre of trying to get all the major points in an up to date way. I suspect I'll be back for at least Tyler through Buchnahan eventually, if I can get them on the cheap like I did Pierce.

I finished that Thursday, but since then there has been Lego so I've not started a new one. Would like to do something more black history/slavery since I've just read two pretty white histories, but my queue is so large that it really depends what hits my eye.

What are good resources regarding Christianity and religious conversion? I'd like to learn about any pre-20th century people who massively converted to the Christian faith, why they did, and what the effects were.

Can anybody point me towards a good primer on the primary sources (I'm thinking mostly chronicles) for France between 1000-1400?

I'm also looking for reading on the role of men-at-arms the the 16th century. Whilst I'm at it, does anybody know anything good on the various military reforms that took place in France starting in the 1440s, up to the end of the century?

Does anyone remember the thread I believe it was asked here, about life in Medieval times and someone replied with a book about a French inquisitor in some French mountain town of about (I THINK not sure 200 people?) at the early days of the Inquisition, he recorded his interviews, daily life of people, the rumours, love relations etc... Anyone remember what book it was?