The History Book Thread! looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The History Book Thread! looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Not quite a book question, but there doesn't appear to be a general history questions thread currently:

Is there any reliable information on the cause of Charles IV of France's death? Sumption says he died of unknown causes, but only devotes around a paragraph to him (at least in Trial by Battle), and most of that on the immediate problems his death (along with Louis X's and Philip V's) caused.

Just wondering if there are any plausible conjectures out there.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2019 00:24

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 04:18

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

SlightlyMad posted:

Yeah, "needs more evidence" seems about right. As a book it is not an academic history book but I will look at whatever claims he makes with some considerable scepticism. That said, I try to be both openminded and sceptical of critics too. (I still don't find the premise of the book preposterous, just unproven.)

Menzies' theory that Chinese explorers circumnavigated the globe in 1421 needs more evidence in the same sense that the theory that aliens built the pyramids does.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2019 20:49

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Neurosis posted:

Trial by Battle is excellent. I'm halfway through it now and fully intend to read the remaining volumes. Lord Sumption's speeches and articles on matters of legal history are also quite interesting - he ties them into broader history which adds interest for people who aren't law nerds (or at least I think so but may not be a good judge as a law nerd myself).

Yeah. The only caveat that I'd throw out is that Sumption's books on the Hundred Years' War are all narrative histories, and so he often sorta slips past some subjects that I wish he'd dive deeper into. It's all very readable as far as magisterial British multivolume history monographs go, though.

Wilson's book on the Thirty Years' War is pretty good as well. In particular he's pretty good a breaking things into discrete subjects and working his way through them while still trying to convey how the various bits fit together. The traditional problem with narrative histories being what I just mentioned about Sumption---tending to collapse complexity in order to maintain the narrative throughline---and the traditional problem with analytic histories being that they tend to get siloed---which has a tendency to obscure the larger context---and Wilson seems to split the difference fairly well.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2019 03:48

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

This is probably too out there, but are there any texts out there dealing with the peculiarities of diet, customs, linguistics, and so on specific to navies during the age of sail besides the Royal Navy? This is something that has been fairly meticulously documented in English for the Royal Navy, perhaps thanks to the popularity of the Aubrey and Maturin novels (which created a whole cottage industry of exegeses for them), but my familiarity with similar material for e.g. the Dutch, French, Spanish, or even American navies is entirely based on the Royal Navy's perceptions of and commentary upon them.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2020 05:44

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

I liked Vasilev's two-volume Byzantine history, but I don't know how it stands among Byzantine scholars.

# ¿ May 20, 2020 04:31

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Cyrano4747 posted:

If you want to get a infantryman�s view of British service you�re really going to have to look at memoirs. I can�t think of any for WW2, though, although I�m sure they�re out there.

Quartered Safe Out Here, George MacDonald Frasier's memoir of his service in Burma during the Second World War, is very much worth a read.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 11:09

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Is there a good single volume on the history of the IWW? After I brought up the Wobblies a couple times in the past several weeks in random discussions (protest songs, the raised fist, and so on), my girlfriend asked for a recommendation. Specifically interested in history more than political theory or whatever.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2020 07:40

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Pick posted:

How to Feed a Dictator

TIME Magazine posted:

The waiters know well Trump�s personal preferences. As he settles down, they bring him a Diet Coke, while the rest of us are served water, with the Vice President sitting at one end of the table. With the salad course, Trump is served what appears to be Thousand Island dressing instead of the creamy vinaigrette for his guests. When the chicken arrives, he is the only one given an extra dish of sauce. At the dessert course, he gets two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, instead of the single scoop for everyone else. The tastes of Pence are also tended to. Instead of the pie, he gets a fruit plate.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2020 22:02

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Is there a better reference on the filibustering insurrections in the 1850s than The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire?

# ¿ Aug 10, 2020 15:30

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Chairman Capone posted:

It's not quite entirely on filibustering, but Matt Karp's This Vast Southern Empire is a more recent work on how slaveowners ran American foreign policy from the 1840s to the civil war. Not sure how his approach works in concert with the earlier book, though.

Yeah, that's the angle I've seen the subject most frequently discussed in--that is, as an antecedent cause of the American Civil War. I'm more interested in details of the filibuster movement(s) themselves, e.g. the internal deliberations (or whatever you want to call them) and daily lives of guys like e.g. Narciso L�pez and William Walker and their followers. Like I'd like to be a fly on the wall of the ship carrying Walker's insurrectionists on their third? fourth? trip to Nicaragua when it runs aground and they get picked up by a Navy vessel that takes them back to the States again.

Like there seems to be a real When Prophecy Fails sorta thing going on in these guys that keep running off in like platoon strength to try to take over a foreign territory and just completely falling on their rear end again and again until they end up getting lined up against the wall in a courtyard somewhere.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2020 17:16

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

A readable overview of the Thirty Years War? It can be long, as long as it is not dry.

Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy is the current consensus pick for a single volume on the subject.

edit: efb, so I'll throw out Wedgwood's book as well, which I believe is out of fashion now, but was long considered the classic book on the subject. Originally published in the '30s, the writing is a bit more turgid than more recent narrative histories, but I still like it purely from a literary standpoint.

SubG fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Sep 1, 2020

# ¿ Sep 1, 2020 14:18

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

dublish posted:

Foote wasn't exactly a Lost Cause proponent, but he was writing in the 50s and 60s. Historiography of the time was transitioning from Lost Cause to a more civil-rights-focused interpretation of the war, and Foote was very much part of that movement. He's out of date now, but it's still a good read if you have the time to get through 3,000 pages of narrative.

In 1997 Foote said that if the Civil War was fought today he'd fight for the Confederacy:

Interview in the Paris Review posted:

INTERVIEWER
Had you been alive during the Civil War, would you have fought for the Confederates?

FOOTE
No doubt about it. What's more, I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar. There's a great deal of misunderstanding about the Confederacy, the Confederate flag, slavery, the whole thing. The political correctness of today is no way to look at the middle of the nineteenth century. The Confederates fought for some substantially good things. States rights is not just a theoretical excuse for oppressing people. You have to understand that the raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn't even read the Constitution, let alone understand it, when he was captured by Union soldiers and asked, What are you fighting for? replied, I'm fighting because you're down here. So I certainly would have fought to keep people from invading my native state.

I guess you can try triangulating something in the exact semantics of what constitutes the Lost Cause mythology--because Foote clearly doesn't buy into all of the nonsense a lot of unsophisticated Lost Causers buy into--but he's manifestly sympathetic to the Confederacy, and he absolutely romanticised the Confederacy and the antebellum South. Which is why his name finds itself in the mouths of shitheels weeping over Confederate monuments.

This isn't some we-can't-judge-from-this-historical-distance thing. The first volume of The Civil War: A Narrative was published in 1958. So I guess if you really want to hand-wring your way into exculpating his veneration of the Confederacy you might be able to scratch out some "man of his times" nonsense there. The second volume was published 1963, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. And the third volume wasn't published until 1974. And then he became a minor celebrity in the '90s after the Burns documentary. And his views do not appear to have evolved in the near four decades between when the first volume was published and when he blithely announced he'd take up arms for the Confederacy if the opportunity were to present itself.

"The Confederates fought for some substantially good things." Any time you have trouble figuring out what to think of Shelby loving Foote, just meditate on the fact that he said that in 1997 after devoting literally decades to Civil War history.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2021 09:54

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Is there a consensus best single volume on the War of the Spanish Succession?

# ¿ Mar 1, 2021 05:45

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Foote can be forgiven for being from the South and writing his trilogy in the 50s but he never evolved in his views up to his death.

I don't think we should forgive the chief propagandist of the Confederacy because he's from the South any more than we should forgive Goebbels just because he was from Germany.

I will join the chorus recommending Battle Cry of Freedom, though, particularly the ~300 pages or so (roughly the first third) of material before Sumter. I'll also throw out a recommendation for Eicher's The Longest Night if you want a single volume more focused on the military side of the Civil War. I think McPherson's very good on the social and political stuff and just so-so on the military side--not just the battles, but the larger operational details--while Eicher mostly glosses over the bigger picture stuff (although he does find time to make the standard gestures, e.g. inserting the standard quotes from the standard diarists, because heaven forfend that a volume on the Civil War declines to quote Mary loving Chestnut) but pulls more stuff about the operational-level stuff from primary sources.

There are obviously plenty of other books on the subject, but Eicher more or less set out to write a milhist companion to Battle Cry of Freedom (and McPherson writes the forward) so it's a fairly natural pairing if you want one.

# ¿ May 19, 2021 23:48

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Comparing Foote to loving Goebbels is quite a take.

Implying that Foote is just a hapless product of his times, or whatever it is that we're expected to stipulate so that we can "forgive" him, is also quite a take.

The Lost Cause mythology isn't just some abstract fact of the Southern landscape that inevitably and unavoidably imprints itself upon blameless Southerners all unawares. It's something that was conjured into existence by propagandists pushing back first against Reconstruction and later, like Foote, against the nascent Civil Rights Movement. The thing we're being asked to "forgive" Foote for isn't a side effect, it isn't some implicit bias or ideological blind spot. It's an intentional effect of Foote's work. It's his goal. He likes the Confederacy. He thinks that the Confederacy stood for "substantially good" things. He's not a product of his times, he's one of the propagandists who actively worked to make the times what they were.

# ¿ May 20, 2021 00:47

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

I don't think David Irving comes up every time someone asks for recommendations for books about the Holocaust, and I don't think I've ever seen someone say that you have to forgive David Irving for being a Holocaust denier because he's just a product of his times.

# ¿ May 20, 2021 03:29

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Lewd Mangabey posted:

My favorite goon takes are the ones that are 8,000 miles over the line.

Here's a nice quotation from the Bibliographical Note of the second volume, published in 1963.

This gives a taste of the reasons to read his series: thoughtful work by a fantastic prose stylist who has life and cultural experiences very different from you, the 202x reader, and who was taking care to present them in what to him seemed like a balanced fashion, rather than as a work of polemic. Obviously we are all going to have major disagreements with someone who was in favor of keeping the Confederate battle flag as a cultural symbol, as he was on record for, but it's also helpful in this era of Internet echo chambers to read work by someone intelligent who doesn't entirely agree with you.

Goebbels, or the chief propagandist of the Confederacy, he definitely is not.

Foote doesn't argue from fact--his books lack citations, to say nothing of more fundamental questions of accuracy (like his whitewashing of Nathan Bedford Forrest). He instead paints an epic narrative, of heroic Southerners valiantly fighting to protect their homeland against the overwhelming industrial power of the North: that is, the Lost Cause narrative.

If someone constructs a narrative to persuade you about some political point of view, using emotional language instead of arguing from the facts, what do you call it if not propaganda? You yourself seem to be suggesting that you object to the content of the ideas, but recommend his work because you find the form compelling. Again: what do we call this if not propaganda?

And if it's propaganda, then he's somebody who's sold hundreds of thousands of books supporting this particular set of ideas. He's reached literally tens of millions more by being in the Ken Burns documentary series. He's one of the single most recognisable Civil War historians to most people, probably one of the most recognisable historian period. His work gets cited favourably even today, in 2021...in places like this thread, as well as by e.g. the Sons of Confederate Veterans opposing the removal of Confederate monuments. If he's not the chief propagandist of the Confederacy, then who's a better candidate today? What unapologetic pro-Confederate voice gets repeated and cited as frequently? What other pro-Confederate writer is defended as stridently, both by other pro-Confederate voices as well as those who purport to deplore the Confederacy?

If he's not the chief propagandist of the Confederacy, then he is certainly its most durable and most mainstream. This conversation, and other similar ones which have taken place in this very thread, is evidence for this.

As for writing in a "balanced fashion", uh...there's a lot of ways to describe calling Nathan Bedford Forrest "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history", but I don't think "balanced" is the word I'd use. Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (an organization for which Foote has much more...nuanced...feelings than most people) is someone that Foote places alongside Lincoln as one of the "two authentic geniuses" of the Civil War.

And of course there's the fact that he said he'd literally fight for the Confederacy...in 1997:

Interview in the Paris Review, 1997 posted:

INTERVIEWER
Had you been alive during the Civil War, would you have fought for the Confederates?

FOOTE
No doubt about it. What's more, I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar. There's a great deal of misunderstanding about the Confederacy, the Confederate flag, slavery, the whole thing. The political correctness of today is no way to look at the middle of the nineteenth century. The Confederates fought for some substantially good things. States rights is not just a theoretical excuse for oppressing people. You have to understand that the raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn't even read the Constitution, let alone understand it, when he was captured by Union soldiers and asked, What are you fighting for? replied, I'm fighting because you're down here. So I certainly would have fought to keep people from invading my native state.

Again, there's a couple ways I'd characterise saying ""The Confederates fought for some substantially good things," but "balanced" is not one of them.

# ¿ May 20, 2021 09:03

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

This quote gets brought up alot about Shelby Foote and I think it gets misconstrued. The 'today if the circumstances were similar' bit in that quote is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting, but it's always been my reading that he's saying 'if I'd been born in Mississippi in 1840 and lived there in 1863, I would absolutely be fighting for the confederacy because that's what basically every white male of military age did because they believed XYZ and were raised in ZYX culture' and not saying 'I, as a person in 1997, would fight for the confederacy tomorrow because I believe it had a just cause and slavery was good.' Maybe that's an overgenerous interpretation.

No, I understand the point you're making and I agree that that's the impression that Foote expects us to take away from it.

But at very best I think this is disingenuous. Foote's engaging in a rhetorical shell game where he dismisses complicated objections about support for the Confederacy as "political correctness" and asserts a simple political ideology held by a putative "raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn't even read the Constitution", and then asserts that his position is the same as this illiterate Confederate. But he's not some raggedy illiterate Confederate. He can't just plead ignorance. At the time of that interview he'd been writing and speaking, professionally, about the Civil War for around 40 years. He'd gotten the lion's share of screen time in the Ken Burns documentary series. The whole reason why the interview was happening in the first place was because he was, at the time, considered an expert on the subject. So the act in which he hand-waves away all of the complications of the position and just says aw shucks I'm just a simple Suthron boy isn't an excuse. It's not an explanation. At best it's evasion, and in practice it's the bedrock for the entire ~*heritage not hate*~ defence of the Confederacy, which expects us to leave aside any ethical or moral questions we might have and just accept the majesty of a Southern white ethnostate simply because it's "traditional".

I mean we could dig in further on this, both on his word choice and on unpacking all of the embedded layers of implication in Foote's entire line of argument here, but like I say I strongly think that it's the opposite of exculpatory, even accepting that Foote's intended reading of the sentiment is the one you suggest.

Because here's the thing: doesn't matter. I don't think we need to engage in a lot of narrow parsing of motivations to condemn somebody for openly stating that he'd fight to preserve slavery. All rationalisations along those lines are lovely on their own merits, they were lovely in their original historical context, they were lovely as part of the system of rationalisations in Jim Crow South, they were lovely as a revanchist reaction against the Civil Rights movement, and they're lovely today when they find their way into the mouths of tiki torch-wielding neonazis opposing the removal of Confederate monuments. My reaction to all of this is gently caress him. Not forgive him because he's just a guy from the South. Not let's just accept that he was a man of his time. No. It was bullshit then. It's bullshit now. And it was bullshit at every moment in between when he was given a pass for whatever reason.

# ¿ May 20, 2021 20:55

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Hammerstein posted:

I don't know how to express it, but reading in an actual book just makes everything more real and I noticed I memorize things better when I read them in a book, than on an electronic device.

One of the things that I've noticed about myself is that when I learn something from a physical book I usually end up carrying around, without making any attempt to do so, a sort of geographic association with whatever it is that I learned. So if I end up needing to go back to something that I got out of a physical text, I can usually recall that what I need was in book so-and-so, about a third of the way in, starts about 3/4 of the way down the verso page, continues halfway down the recto. That kind of thing. If that makes sense.

I never have had that sort of "geographic" recollection about anything I've read in etexts, even ones that preserve the pagination of the physical text.

I mean etexts do have the advantage of being searchable. Which is absolutely not to be scoffed at. O lord, as someone who spent time having to use a physical card catalogue and the loving Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, searchable texts are not to be maligned. But I absolutely believe that I retain information differently when I read it on an screen instead of on a printed page.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2021 01:37

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

CrypticFox posted:

That's a tough question, because there is so much written about that subject and very little agreement among scholars about the topic. If you want to learn about that topic, you are going to want to read more than one book, but a good starting point is Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Freidman. It was first published in 1987 so it might be a little out of date, but a new edition was published in 2019 which might make that less big of a deal.

Freidman's still pretty good as for a single volume/intro kind of thing.

The question is really how much reading you want to do. If you really want to get down in the weeds, every volume of the Anchor Bible has its own annotated translation along with analysis/criticism of the text, sources, and so on.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2021 10:48

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Moreau posted:

I've been reading a lot of medieval European histories, but I think its time for a change of scenery. Are there any good 'starter' histories of China outside the modern era? I have no interest in reading about anything post Opium Wars (yet), but I'd love to dig into Chinese history before that. I have to admit, I know nothing of the region!

I haven't read more than a couple volumes, but I've liked the parts of the Harvard History of Imperial China series I've read. They're not narrative histories if that's what you're after, but as someone who went in knowing only bits and bobs about the early Chinese Imperial history I found them readable enough.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2021 12:43

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Arbite posted:

It is absolutely not a work to further the Lost Cause.

Is this a Simpsons-esque "Not Lost Cause, but #1 among Lost Causers" bit? Because unless you're trying to very narrowly parse the definition of the "Lost Cause" myth Shelby Foote's work isn't just a work that furthered the Lost Cause myth, it's the work that furthered it in the post-Jim Crow era. You know that quote from Lee Atwater where in the '50s you could go down South and drop hard Rs left and right but then the '60s happened and instead of using the N word the Republicans had to start talking about bussing and states rights? Shelby loving Foote is exactly that for the Lost Cause.

Motherfucker went to his grave willing to fight for the Confederacy and he was the world's thirstiest fanboy for the guy who founded the Klan. That's who he was, and if you don't believe he "furthered" the Lost Cause narrative then ask some no-poo poo real Lost Causers because they sure as hell think he did.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2021 00:57

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

This is probably way too narrow, but is there a good history of Fraxinetum out there?

# ¿ Dec 24, 2021 11:21

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Fate Accomplice posted:

Earlier this week I consumed Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal in audiobook form and it was intense. I knew the name Kim Philby before but that was all.

I haven't listened to the audiobook, but I read the book itself a few years ago and I agree it's pretty entertaining, but it's probably worth pointing out that Macintyre allows himself to embellish or imagine many details when the information in the public domain is scarce. I can't remember specific examples at the moment, but when I was reading through it I was also going through a number of related reference works (e.g. Hinsley's British Intelligence in the Second World War) as well as primary sources (Venona material, Guy Liddell's diaries, and so on) and came away feeling that Macintyre was oversimplifying or obscuring difficulties with his intepretation/dramatisation. Not like he fabricates anything or is outright misleading or anything like that, but more like he's imagining how specific events played out in dramatic/narrative form, and then when I went through the source materials I'd come away with a different impression of the sense/tone/whatever. Like I said I can't remember any specific examples, and overall I enjoyed the book, but with some caveats.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2022 09:26

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

I've been reading a lot of critical stuff involving the Matter of Britain, which is all of the literature, mythology, and so on involving King Arthur and that whole lot. One of the interesting things about it is how much the familiar elements evolve over time: we expect precisely one Lady of the Lady and one Excalibur, but the number of each is moderately variable in different incarnations of the tales (Malory, for example, is compelled to supply Arthur with two Excaliburs to account for all of the Excalibur acquisition stories he wants to include--drawing forth from the stone and also the farcical aquatic ceremony). Perhaps the most emphatic example of this is the Holy Grail, which first appears in Chr�tien de Troyes' unfinished Perceval and which at the time is definitely not holy and what precisely a "grail" even is isn't entirely clear. Subsequent authors seeking to complete de Troyes' story, or expand upon it, decide that the grail is a stone, or a wash basin, or a bowl, or a cup, and eventually begin imputing various magical abilities to it, finally conflating it with the cup Jesus used in the Last Supper, this cup itself the subject of an extensive body of fan fiction imagining that Joseph of Arimathea used it to catch some of Jesus' blood during the Crucifixion.

Anyway, this sort of exegesis is pretty much a fundamental part of any modern approach to a historical document (or collection of documents).

What are some works that look at this sort of thing for events/periods/whatever in popular history? Like a couple years ago someone recommended Alan Moore's From Hell to me, and as soon as I started reading it I got that tingling sensation that I wasn't just being bullshitted in general or bullshitted in some manner devised entirely for the purposes of the story, but rather that I was being subjected to a fairly well-exercised system of folk bullshit. If that makes sense. Looking around for any "real" history about the Ripper murders turns out to be somewhat difficult, as most of the writing on the subject tends toward the "imagine the screaming terror of their final blood-soaked minutes" sort of thing that seems to be the bread and butter of "true crime" writing. But I found one volume by Philip Sugden which spends most of its time carefully explaining not just what bits of the popular history are bullshit, but also tracing the documentary history of the development of the bullshit.

Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History does something similar with a lot of conspiracy theories involving the JFK assassination. What are some more examples, for whatever subject matter? Books that are exegeses of popular perception of historical events or whatever, if that makes sense.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2022 03:36

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

blue squares posted:

I finished The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It was one of the best history books I have ever read: sweeping, intensely detailed, total in its scope and harrowing in its devastating conclusion.

What should I read next? I want to read another detailed work like it, probably about a scientific process that was majorly impactful to the world. Perhaps there is something comparable that is about NASA/getting to the moon? I'm open to things not just about science, but other sorts of massive projects that were important, shaped by and shaping the times in which they happened.

Digital Apollo? It's nominally about the Apollo Guidance Computer, the onboard control system for the Apollo missions, but goes back to the beginnings of manned flight to examine the design decisions (and design assumptions) about what the role of a pilot even is, the tradeoffs between control and stability, and so on. It's pretty good, and if you want a list of supplemental materials surrounding the subject that I ended up consulting when I worked my way through it, I got that too.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2022 20:19

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

BigglesSWE posted:

Is there any work in particular about the Arab Revolt (World War I) that I should poke around in?

I don't know what the current consensus pick is for academic histories, but the classic literary one is Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

# ¿ May 3, 2022 21:57

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

vyelkin posted:

Asif Siddiqi is the author you want. He has multiple books about Soviet spaceflight, one of which (specifically about the Cold War space race from the Soviet perspective) is available for free from NASA in PDF or hardcopy, and the other of which is about the prehistory of that race, the hundred years of Russian and Soviet fascination with space that led up to Sputnik in 1957.

Yeah, if you want a single volume on the subject it's hard to beat Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo.

You can also get free PDFs of the four volumens of Boris Chertok's Rockets and People from NASA if you want primary sources.

# ¿ May 9, 2022 20:14

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

FMguru posted:

Yeah, no matter what wartime decisions you change or military outcomes you reverse, the Manhattan Project wraps up its work in mid-1945 and the war ends with a total Allied victory shortly thereafter.

The Manhattan Project is really rounding error compared to the disparity in production capacity of just the US and the Axis powers. The IJN can basically never win in the Pacific outside of some wild counterfactuals, like a much more successful first strike leading to the US never entering the war, successfully suing for peace after Coral Sea, or something like that. Because absent something like that, they're eventually going to have to confront the fact that they're facing a navy that can float more new tonnage every couple weeks than they can in the entire war.

Or if you're Germany you eventually end up in a situation where in the length of time it takes one of your wunderwaffe tanks to crawl a quarter mile, it has a) destroyed its transmission, and b) American factories have produced an entire platoon of Shermans.

Canned sunshine is nice and all, but it's absolutely not the biggest problem facing any hypothetical Axis victory scenario.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2022 23:43

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Rand Brittain posted:

I really enjoyed A Distant Mirror, which is probably going to have a lot of influence on the RPG I'm designing, and it also got me to finally decide to take a vacation to London and Paris this summer and see some stuff.

Does anybody have any other books to recommend that focus on medieval Europe and the surrounding periods? (Or, I suppose, any sightseeing tips?)

From that description you might be interested in Mortimer's The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. It's pop-history-ish and the conceit is a bit twee, but the history is solid enough. The main caveat I'd offer is to mind the limitations of what's presented—it's not really a guide to mediaeval England in general, but rather specific regions of England in the late mediaeval period, and is somewhat skewed toward the lifestyles of the comparatively well-off.

If you're looking for source material for game design but don't want to slog through, say, the seven volumes of the Cambridge mediaeval history series, you could do worse.

# ¿ May 7, 2023 09:30

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Yeah that�s just non-intro history texts. Most monographs focusing on a specific more niche subject are going to assume you know the basics.

At one point I had a book on late mediaeval English manorial food production and consumption that I was using as bathroom reading, and one day my girlfriend comes out of the bathroom with the book open and quizzes me on three or four terms (virgate, heriot, that kind of thing) and then complained, "And that's just the first page!"

# ¿ Mar 6, 2024 00:44

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 04:18

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

BitAstronaut posted:

Anyone have any recommendations for books covering the US Navy during WW2?

I'll go ahead and throw out a recommendation for Morison's History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. It needs a number of caveats due to the nature of the work: it was started in 1947, so doesn't include materials about e.g. cryptography and intelligence that were available to later writers; Morison received a commission and assistance from the Navy to write it; and so on. But it also covers a number of subjects, particularly on the early war stuff (defence of the home waters, actions off North Africa, and so on) that don't seem to get a very serious treatment in most general works on the subject (where it's Pacific, Pacific, Pacific, oh yeah something about U-boats and D-Day, Pacific, Pacific, Pacific).

# ¿ Apr 8, 2024 20:57

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The History Book Thread! looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf