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.
Reading: Just finished reading Breuilly's The Formation of the First German Nation State and I loved it. I found Breuilly's focus on the possibilities of German Unification did a lot to highlight the social, political, and economic factors that conditioned it. That is, Breuilly seems to recognise that there were a broad set of factors pushing towards some sort of transformation in German-speaking lands, but exactly how that would play out would be contingent on events and key decision makers, and that forces Breuilly to discuss what social forces were at work and how much political actors knew, without falling into some great man trap. Also the annotated bibliography is to die for.
I don't think any of the other books in the series are interesting to me, but I'm tempting to just pick some up at random considering how useful Breuilly was.
Request: Any advice on a good introduction to Marxism for historians? That is a guidebook (or paper) about how Marxian concepts have been deployed by historians, how useful they are still be used and contested, and which historians have been major influences in bringing Marxian thought into history. I can think of some key Marxian historians (EP Thompson, Chris Wickham, Eric Hobsbawm), but it would be nice to have a wider view. I was thinking of grabbing Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-first Century, (ed. by Wickham) but to be blunt, tend to find methodological collective writings rather unfocused, since each author rarely has enough room to fully lay out their ideas.
Honestly, I'd also be interested if there's anything like that for Gramsci or Foucault?
I would like to recommend Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book On Stalin’s Team, which provides interesting insights into the inner political circles around Stalin from his rise to power to his death.
I want to read a book which gives an overview of the history of the world and maybe some interlinking between these histories as well. I could Google it but I believe Redditors more these days. Thank you.
Would anyone be able to point me to a book or two that might help be able to give me a good understanding of the workings of a modern or semi-modern (World War II and onward) naval capital ship or aircraft carrier?
I'm interested in what roles and responsibilities the crew had, from the bridge crew on down, and what daily life might have been/be like. Trying to understand what generally goes into allowing such large vessels to function. Thank you!
I have two requests.
any books on Illinois state politics during prohibition/Al Capone? I’m curious what the state house was like during those times.
something that focuses on the politics of the Roman Senate. Like the issues they debated and what was going on with them during crisis such as the Punic war.