Thursday Reading and Research is intended as an academic free-for-all, for the discussion of all issues historical, or tangentially so. Suggested topics include, but are by no means limited to:
New developments or discoveries in the field
Recent book releases, old book reviews, reading recommendations, or just talking about what you're reading now
Historiographical discussions, debates, and disputes
Your current research interests or projects
The goings on within the academy
...And so on!
Regular participants in the Thursday threads should just keep doing what they've been doing; newcomers should take notice that this thread is meant for open discussion only of matters historical discussion, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.
I’m reading Heart of Europe, a history of the Holy Roman Empire by a Harvard professor. Rather than divide by specific rulers or ruling families or even by territorial changes, each chapter focuses on an important part of the Empire or its connections throughout its entire history. For example, the first chapter is the connection between the Empire and the Papacy, and the second is religion as a whole. This professor seems to feel that the vast majority of perceived problems in the Empire are instead individual strengths that made it a unique, true “empire”, in a very old-world sense of very separated administrative regions. For example, the author alleges that German historians harshly criticized the HRE for not centralizing into a German nation-state, but he argues that this lack of unification was what made it a continuation of the theory of a single empire at any one era, which was an idea the Papacy subscribed to from the ending years of Rome into the early modern period.
I don’t always agree with the positive sentiment and perspectives towards the Empire, but it is fascinating regardless.
The Experiment: Georgia's Forgotten Revolution 1918-1921 by Eric Lee (2017)
I read this a few weeks ago, but finally am getting around to talking about it. The Democratic Republic of Georgia (which existed from 1917-21) is a really interesting topic, one I'd like to actually do some work on. There isn't much on it in English, which is where Lee's book could have come in handy. However he is a self-proclaimed socialist, and an active advocate for the socialist movement in the US. That isn't an issue, except that he isn't a historian, and this book shows it. Instead it is more an advocacy for the DRG and its socialist policies (the government was Menshevik, who were once part of the Russian Social Democrat Party, until a split with another group, the Bolsheviks). He hardly has any original research, mostly using secondary literature, and heavily relies on Karl Kautsky's book of his visit to Georgia in 1920 (Kautsky was a German socialist who's views Lee greatly agrees with). It would have been really nice to have information on the DRG in one book, but Lee's is not the answer to that, though it is nice to have the various pieces of information on it combined in one source, even if it isn't the most scholarly work.