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:
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.
Can I call on the collective knowledge of the commune please? Doing some research around what traders would carry for trade in 1750-1850 approx and specifically kitchen ware i.e pots pans kettles etc, can anyone recommend some good sources/reading?
Any suggestions for analysis of the development and text of religious texts that aren't Jewish or Christian (eg biblical criticism, but not the bible haha)? Anything vaguely in that area would be really interesting me
Does anyone have recommendations of the history of the development of the industrial research lab? I'm interested in both narrative history and the factors of why it developed.
I’m looking for good books that cover Imperial China specifically military and political history but any good book on imperial China generally would be appreciated.
Any recommendations for books about Tadeusz Kościuszko or the Yugoslav Wars?
Kinda vague, but I'm looking for anything on what a skillful military retreat using railways might entail? My interest was piqued by this short section in Holger Herwig's The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918 regarding the Battle of Ivangorod (key part in bold):
On 28 September [1914] Hindenburg’s Ninth Army (9 divisions) attacked west of the Vistula, supported 3 days later by four Austro-Hungarian armies to the south.... Driving rain dogged the advance. Poland’s dirt roads became quagmires, and streams and swamps rose to dangerous levels. Then the temperature dropped suddenly. Rain turned to snow. Sixty Russian divisions counterattacked the 18 German divisions in Galicia. In what the historian B. H. Liddell Hart has called ‘perhaps the finest example of his art as well as one of the masterpieces of all military history’, Ludendorff conducted a skilful retreat, using his lateral railroads to fall back on Cracow...
But outside of Liddel Hart's book (which seems to touch on this fine example of the art of retreat only incidentally) the only reference provided is to a 1929 publication from the German archive (which is unsurprisingly in German). So if anyone knows any other works that cover this (or more generally the subject of well-planned and executed retreats of armies via railway -presuming that's not too niche a thing to call a "subject" 😅) I'd be grateful for any recommendations :)