So the mess over at this question today, plus my own archival work over the past few months, has put me in a reflective mood over the current state of popular understandings of environmental history. It'd be great to have more featured themes and discussions around environmental history, not only specifics but also questions of methodology and historiography. I can't respond to that posted question because I don't do medieval history nor Europe, but the miscommunications and missteps in the thread are common ones I see in environmental history, most notably the idea that "history" and "science" have hard lines between them and only one can reveal the truth of what the earth looked like x number of years ago. Who else here is an environmental historian or a historical geographer (that's more my field) and what do you see as the most important challenges facing popular understandings of your work today?

Edit: I won't directly address a now-gone comment but a few more thoughts to answer my own question: as someone who works between natural sciences and the humanities, I find it frustrating the positivist assertions coming out of a lot of empirical science fields (including social sciences) that we can find out "the truth" about the past. However such researchers usually go into the project with a declensionist narrative of the environment (that the environment used to be "better" and is "worse" now) and look to verify that rather than being open to the ecological and narrative possibilities of change, variation, and diversity. Such assumptions and preconceived notions are not limited to the "science" side of the divide, but the positivist foundations of STEM in the university today definitely makes it so that it's very common.

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I'm sorry to re-ask a question, but it has been a while.

Are there any good books about the processes of allied government of Germany, especially in the American zone? If I understand correctly, that would be from May 1945 and trailing off towards the establishment of West and East Germany, being the Allied Control Council and the administration of the four zones, right?

I'm particularly interested in a moderately detailed look, especially how law and order was maintained, how any existing administrative structures and personnel were used, how previous German laws were treated (repealed, amended, whatever), and fiscal matters of taxation and budgets.

After a great deal of work by a number of flaired users, I'm pleased to announce that the revamped World War I Booklist is ready to be rolled out! Still some holes that we'll be working behind the scenes to fill, but it has undergone a massive effort in revamping and updating to better provide a useful selection of literature on the topic for all aspects of the war! A bit thanks to all the flairs who have helped, and especially /u/deverence who put in the gruntwork to get the updates up and live on the sub's Wiki!

This week in my ongoing research for a new book I'm writing, I had to hunt down H. P. Lovecraft's thoughts on Oswald Spengler's influential work The Decline of the West, the first volume of which was translated into English and published in 1926, and the second in 1928.

Lovecraft appears to have read the first volume relatively soon after release, as the first mentions of it in his letters appear in February 1927. There is no evidence he ever read the second volume, and his comments in his letters suggest that he took Spengler's scholarly argument on the rise, decadence, and fall of cultures as more confirmation of ideas that Lovecraft had already had than as new concepts - although in at least one respect, Spengler surprised him:

Let me return by saying how thoroughly I agree with you regarding Spengler’s distinction betwixt the “Faustian” or modern western sense of infinity (which begins with a clearer idea of, & interest in, one’s orientation in time & space) & the classical localism & lack of a time-sense. Spengler, I may add, produced a profound impression upon me when I first encountered him a decade ago--and this despite my inability to endorse completely his view of a culture as a quasi-biological organism. His pointing out of the modern time-&-space consciousness as opposed to the Hellenic indifference to long cycles and sequences (when did the Greeks ever think of their world as a momentary dot in an endless line or curve? What mind was it which created conflicts of data in its leading myths, & established as fixed chronological relationships betwixt such cycles of events as the Seven against hemes, Trojan War, &c. &c.?) gave me almost a shock, because it revealed so great a streak of the non-classical in myself, who have always felt so closely akin to the Graeco-Roman as opposed to the mediaeval. [...] Yet I could not help being convinced & impressed--even at the cost of admitting that a dominant part of my personality was non-classical & even anti-classical.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, 10 Nov 1936, Letters to C. L. Moore & Others 273

Lovecraft also criticized Spengler's characterization of cultures as quasi-organic entities, feeling it was a metaphor carried too far - but the gist of his letters show that works like this helped to buttress and solidify many of his ideas, by giving him scholastic efforts to lean on as authorities.