Thursday Reading and Recommendations is intended as bookish free-for-all, for the discussion and recommendation of all books historical, or tangentially so. Suggested topics include, but are by no means limited to:
Asking for book recommendations on specific topics or periods of history
Newly published books and articles you're dying to read
Recent book releases, old book reviews, reading recommendations, or just talking about what you're reading now
Historiographical discussions, debates, and disputes
...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 of history and books, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.
I decided to bite the bullet and order "The Wiley-Blackwell Companion for Zoroastrianism", after exhausting other options. Bloody expensive at €110 or so, so it better be worth it. It's probably the most comprehensive source of the research of the last decade, which I badly need to complement my other, more dated works...
Thanks to r/patents I read a fascinating article on patents and slavery. I had never considered it before, but since slaves weren’t allowed to take an oath (much less receive and transfer a property right) and slave-owners couldn’t swear to be the inventor, inventions produced by enslaved people in the US weren’t technically patentable before the Civil War. This rather irked slave owners, and they made sure to rectify the matter under CSA law. Meanwhile, in the wake of Dred Scott free African Americans couldn’t follow the requirement to declare a country of citizenship, so for a time they weren’t eligible either. The author includes a great deal of correspondence on the subject, including a series from an irate lawyer/cotton planter making the case that it would violate equal protection if those who owned human beings couldn’t also own their inventions.
Parts of The Cambridge Ancient History are now almost fifty years old. Are there any other, more recent, series of books that provide a history of the Ancient world or, if not, what are some good books that focus on particular areas of the world during Antiquity?
Some weeks ago I asked for books on agricultural history and /u/anthropology_nerd suggested Changes in the Land by Cronon. Pretty enjoyable book and informative too!
But I'm still looking for something that covers agricultural innovation and such up to Green Revolution e.g. when did scythes replace sickles and how did scythes spread? Where did moldboard plows originate and where and how were they adopted in different lands? How did different grains rise and fall in popularity and all those sort of things.
Anyone able to recommend a good, fairly short overview of 19th century France?
Does anyone have any recc. for books on British parliamentary history or British parliament in general?