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.
Looking for reading recommendations for any of the following topics:
-Northern Europe in the Late Middle Ages
-Early Modern England and the Glorious revolution
-Economics or proto-economics in the Middle Ages
I posted this a couple weeks ago and got one response but I’ll give it one more spin:
I’m interested in reading about energy in past societies, or some sort of civilizational metabolism I guess. I’m interested in climate change and renewable energy transitions today, and I recently read Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital. I enjoyed it, and I’d like to dig more into some of the historical background touched on. Things like examination of the energetic basis of societies and the natural limits faced.
I’m happy to read about any period/location.
Can anyone recommend a good, not very politicized book on the Spanish Civil War? (If such a book exists!)
Context (skippable if you just know a good book to recommend):
I randomly picked up En Defensa de España by Stanley Payne, which I expected to be heavily biased based on the title (and it is), but I grabbed it mainly for practice reading in Spanish. For the war he has a narrative (without spending much time on supporting evidence) that emphasizes things like the assassination of Sotelo, and spends a lot of time trying to make Franco sound less bad than the Popular Front and some other stuff I'm skeptical about. Anyway it felt pretty one-sided---although he does spend some time directly addressing left wing versions of the story and certainly isn't pretending to be at all sympathetic to the left.
Ideally I want a book that compares and contrasts right wing and left wing narratives (and maybe other perspectives too) about the war without necessarily taking a side, or maybe if it takes a side at least sketching for me what some other people think in the best way possible (Payne does not do this: to me he often seemed to prefer to attack what I assume to be the worst arguments of his opponents).
Does this book exist? Or do I just need to read multiple books if I really want to understand things about this period? (I'd appreciate recommendations for books in either Spanish or English.)
Thanks in advance...
Literally anything by Pauline Croft.
I'd read her tax returns and love it.
Also "Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England" by Tim Stretton (2005) is a very thorough look at a lesser known aspect of history; women litigants in patriarchal culture.
It is sad that the period between 1814-1921 is so nationalised in Eastern European history. I have been struggling to find English language books of this period about the three Baltic states, Finland, Poland, Belarus etc. and almost nothing exists other than few chapters in overall history books, nothing in-depth. I tried searching for books about this period in the native languages and it seems like there are lots of books about this period in Lithuanian language about Lithuanian history for example, but none of them are translated in English. Same thing with Estonian and Finnish books as far as I managed to check using Google Translate and Google search.
Looking for books about how was the exploration of south america. How the colonizers survived the jungles, diseases and other challenges.