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.
Any recommendations on English-language histories of Commonwealth-era Poland are much appreciated. A reputable source outside of Norman Davies is truly the shining star in the historical void that is English-language Polish history.
Soviet Manpower situation in 1943-45? What books have good figures and statistics on how much strain the Red Army was under later in the war?
I know it's probably in one of Glanz's books, but those take a lot of time to get through so I was hoping somebody could give me a place to start.
In sharp contrast to my grumblings about Shepherd and Pattinson's War in a Twilight World: Partisan and Anti-Partisan Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1939-1945, I recently picked up Kenneth Slepyan's Stalin's Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II and Alexander Statiev's The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands, and I am really looking forward to finishing them. Slepyan is textbook social history for the partisans and I am absolutely living for it. He talks about how partisan life produced new understandings of what it meant to be a Soviet citizen, which were often not at all sanctioned by the state, and also about the prewar social fabric which produced partisan identities. Statiev I have only read the intro for, because I think it makes more sense to read him directly after Slepyan, but just in the introduction he raises some really solid points about intersecting identities in the 'border regions' of Eastern Poland and the Baltics. The overlapping ethnic, national, and political sources of identity in these regions produced 'nested identities.' For instance, one could be a Galician Ukrainian, which is really a composite of several layered identities: Galician, Ukrainian, Slavic, Soviet. This idea is not original to Statiev, I think it originates with a 1999 book by Guntram Herb and David Kaplan, but it's very interesting to see it applied to counterinsurgency theory.
I would like to find a book about Cahokia or the other moundbuilding cultures of North America.
Anyone have any good book recs on denazification, or more generally about political alignment after fascism in Germany, Japan, or Italy?
Looking for English language sources for late-medieval or early modern Netherlands and Scandinavia. Especially interested in economic history. Thanks for the help!
Can anyone reccomend some good resources on mid republican rome? Especially around the time of the second punic war, but not just limited to military history, but also cultural, economic, and political as well.
Anybody have a recommendation for a book about the German Revolution of 1918-19?
I'm looking for books about Dalmatae tribes and other illyrian tribes (mostly interested in dalmataes)
What are good books that can serve as starting points for someone who wants to become better educated on the history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas?
I'm fascinated by the lost Franklin Expedition (1845), and the search for the Northwest Passage during that golden age of polar exploration.
Any book recommendations on this topic? I've already read Erebus, by Michael Palin which has left me hungry for more!
Thanks :)