Do you have any really outstanding histories of the Song or Ming dynasties to recommend? I read the excellent book "1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline" by Ray Huang and would love to read more books like it. I'd especially like to understand the "texture" of those times - what did people and society worry about? How did they relate to their values? What were their prejudices and assumptions?
And of course, details about military campaigns, training, equipment, marshalling, etc will all appeal to my inner grognard :) I'm particularly interested in the organization of Song and Ming navies, and in the failed Song campaigns with the Jin against the Liao.
Thank you for any and all suggestions!
I share your affinity for Huang's brilliant book. If you're looking for a relatively recent deep-dive into upper court politics in the Ming, John Dardess is a good choice. A Political Life in Ming China, his biography of Xu Jie, provides a very interesting cross-section of Ming social and political life by following, step-by-step, the life of a successful and generally honest official. Much like Huang, Dardess engages creatively with the existing literary evidence of the era to craft a convincing portrait of a real man and his times. He also has another work, Four Seasons, that follows the various grand secretaries under the Jiajing Emperor, grandfather of Wanli. Despite his focus on grand strategy and politics, Dardess does a great job bringing to life the day-to-day realities of life at various levels of Ming society.
In the course of reading Dardess, who provides a good exploration of neo-Confucian ideology and how it impacted Ming politics and society, I came upon a highly engaging article on the scholar-official Wang Yangming's suppression of a dangerous princely revolt in 1519. "The Prince and the Sage: Concerning Wang Yangming’s “Effortless” Suppression of the Ning Princely Establishment Rebellion" by Larry Israel. It gives a good overview of the (increasingly fraught) political situation in rural southern China in the middle Ming.
Peter Lorge is my recommendation for straight-up military history - anything he's written on late imperial warfare or the reunification of China under the Song provides great context on practical military affairs. This latter work, "The Reunification of China," provides a fantastic deep-dive into the Song-Liao campaigns. For Song political history, Patricia Buckley Ebrey's biography of Emperor Huizong is rich with cultural, religious, and social detail. Ebrey provides an excellent account of the Song-Jin alliance, falling-out, and the Disaster of Jingkang.
If your interest is more related to military history, try looking up books by Peter Lorge, who has done a lot of work on Song military history, and whose War, Politics, and Society book also includes Ming. His overall catalogue should be a good starting point for much of what you're interested in!