(Part 2) Best products from r/AskHistorians

Oooh it's my lucky day! My thesis is on the peace process, so I've accumulated a pretty big bibliography as I've gone along; I'll give you some good references to get you started below. It's a really fascinating moment in time to study. Just out of my own curiosity -- what has piqued your interest in looking at the IRA in particular in relation to the Good Friday Agreement?

Please note, in flagrant disregard of your specifications (I'm sorry!), these are all books:

Bryan, Dominic. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control.

• Bryan is an anthropologist, and this book marks the first anthropological study to focus solely on the Orange Order; his research ran concurrent to the peace process and so gives some insight into the Protestant community at this time.
  
  de Bréadún, Deaglán. The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland. 2nd edition. Cork: The Collins Press, 2008.
  
  
• de Bréadún is a veteran journalist in NI, and presents a very compelling and readable account of the process here.
  
  Gallaher, Carolyn. After the Peace: Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-Accord Northern Ireland. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.
  
  
• This book offers a nice counterpoint to your interest in the IRA vis-à-vis the Agreement.
  
  Gilligan, Chris and Jonathan Tonge. Peace and War? Understanding the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997.
  
  
• A nice, easy-to-understand introduction to many of the major events and elements of the peace process.
  
  Jarman, Neal. Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Berg, 1997.
  
  
• Like Bryan, Jarman is an anthropologist (in fact, the two have worked together quite extensively), and this book is the result of fieldwork performed throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, if I recall correctly; it predates the GFA itself, but is instructive in exploring the ways in which material culture and rituals (murals, images, parading, etc.) shaped the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland during this time.
  
  McKay, Susan. Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000.
  
  
• I love this book. McKay is another veteran journalist, and this book chronicles her conversations and interviews with Protestants all over the state in the lead-up to the passing of the GFA. It provides a window into a great many different Protestant states of mind and opinions on the peace process and the Agreement. Part of it is available online here.
  
  McKittrick, David and David McVea. Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict. London: Penguin, 2001.
  
  
• By a couple more journalists, this is an excellent and very accessible primer for a background of the Troubles; it's my go-to citation for such a purpose, and includes three or four chapters that directly address the peace process and cover up to about the year 2000.
  
  McAuley, James W. and Graham Spencer. Ulster Loyalism after the Good Friday Agreement : History, Identity and Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
  
  
• A nice recent collection of essays on, you guessed it, Ulster loyalism after the GFA.
  
  McLaughlin, Greg and Stephen Baker. The Propaganda of Peace: The Role of Media and Culture in the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Bristol: Intellect, 2010.
  
  
• Media coverage of the peace process played a hugely significant role (of course) in public perceptions of and conversations around it. My university offers this as an electronic resource with full-text available online; yours might as well.
  
  Patterson, Henry and Eric Kauffman. Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945: The Decline of the Loyal Family. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
  
  Rowan, Brian. Behind the Lines: The Story of the IRA and Loyalist Ceasefires. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995.
  
  
• One chapter available online here.
  

Thanks to /u/integral_grail for a solid answer! I can give a more comprehensive answer, but you definitely laid out some of the basics.

So: "Where the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm widely known before they compiled them?"

Yes, they were (or at least, the vast majority of them were). We have records of tale variants of most of the tales the Brothers Grimm collected from all over the world, sometimes several variants from a single location, from different centuries. Cinderella, for example, has over 500 variants in Europe alone! Many of the tales the Brothers Grimm collected were widely known and circulated in various forms for hundreds of years before the Grimms came along. The brothers themselves were heavily influenced by the French versions of several of their tales, for example. Several of the more popular versions of well-known tales (the versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, etc that we think of today when we say "the story of [x]") were actually first widely circulated in Italy, France, and Spain before they ever reached Germany on the same level.

This actually leads into your second question, "Did the more popular ones (Snow White, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood) match the ones more popular before they collected them?" The short answer is "no." The slightly longer answer is "many bore a lot of similarities, but every variant is different."

Maria Tatar actually briefly covers this in her introduction to The Classic Fairy Tales:

>Fairy tales, Angela Carter tells us, are not "unique one-offs," and their narrators are neither "original" nor "godlike" nor "inspired." To the contrary, these stories circulate in multiple versions, reconfigured by each telling to form kaleidoscopic variations with distinctly different effects. When we say the word "Cinderella," we are referring not to a single text but to an entire array of stories with a persecuted heroine who may respond to her situation with defiance, cunning, ingenuity, self-pity, anguish, or grief. She will be called Yeh-hsien in China, Cendrillon in Italy, Aschenputtel in Germany, and Catskin in England. Her sisters may be named One-Eye and Three-Eyes, Anastasia and Drizella, or she may have just one sister named Haloek. Her tasks range from tending cows to sorting peas to fetching embers for a fire.

> ......The story of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, can be discovered the world over, yet it varies radically in texture and flavor from one culture to the next. Even in a single culture, that texture or flavor may be different enough that a listener will impatiently interrupt the telling to insist "that's not the way I heard it." In France, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are devoured by the wolf. The Grimms' version, by contrast, stages a rescue scene in which a hunter intervenes to liberate Red Riding Hood and her grandmother from the belly of the wolf. Caterinella, an Italian Red Riding Hood, is invited to dine on the teeth and ears of her grandmother by a masquerading wolf. A Chinese "Goldflower" manages to slay the beast who wants to devour her by throwing a spear in his mouth. Local color often affects the premise of a tale. In Italy, the challenge facing one heroine is not spinning straw into gold but downing seven plates of lasagna.

The French Cinderella by Perrault, for example, is the version with glass slippers, a fairy godmother, and a pumpkin carriage. The Brothers Grimm version? Her "fairy godmother" is the spirit of her dead mother who resides in a tree, there is no pumpkin carriage, and she is gifted three beautiful dresses (one for each night of the ball) rather than a pair of glass slippers. Basically: every version of a tale is different, especially ones based in the oral storytelling tradition. Location, class, time, and the teller all affect how the story is told and what story is told. This is why fairy tale scholars usually examine the underlying basic plot structure (known as a "tale type") that appears despite rich cultural variation rather than trying to find exact copies of tales transmitted across cultures. When we do find tale variants that are remarkably similar to each other in plot, theme, tone, narrative structure, and language, that tends to be a sign that those two cultures were communicating with each other on a fairly regular and intimate basis via trade, immigration, or other forms of cultural exchange.

Your third question, "Were they immediately of academic interest?" is a little bit tricky, because the Brothers Grimm themselves were trying to collect, preserve, edit, and distribute the tales due to their academic interest in them; their initial collection of the tales was what essentially amounted to a literary archeological expedition (complete with making it up as they went along). As they stated in the preface to the 1812 edition:

>“It was perhaps just the right time to record these tales since those people who should be preserving them are becoming more and more scarce...Wherever the tales still exist, they continue to live in such a way that nobody ponders whether they are good or bad, poetic or crude. People know them and love them because they have simply absorbed them in a habitual way. And they take pleasure in them without having any reason. This is exactly why the custom of storytelling is so marvelous.”

I think I would need further clarification on whether you were referring to the Grimms' collection 'Kinder-und Hausmärchen/Children's and Household Tales' or whether you mean fairy tales more generally. I've previously detailed here and here how the Brothers Grimm were extremely self-aware that they were preserving German heritage and how many of the fairy tale collection collectors/editors did so due to the rise of romantic nationalism and the rise of a "scholarly interest" in folklore and fairy tales/wonder tales. In general, academic interest in wonder tales/household tales/fairy tales has been around since at least the late 1600s/early 1700s with the rise of French salon culture and the renewed interest in such tales among the aristocracy, though serious academic interest didn't arise until the late 1700s/early 1800s.

Parsing out whether the Grimms collection was of immediate academic interest is a little more...convoluted because they weren't working in a vacuum; as I stated before, they were operating within the rise of romantic nationalism and a rising academic interest in folklore and fairy tale collection and dissemination. They were themselves scholars employed at the University of Göttingen as professors and librarians and later at the University of Berlin. It's important to stress they produced other things besides their collection of Household Tales, though that is what they are most known for today: Jacob's collection Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology) in 1835 was actually considered a more valuable addition to the German literary landscape at the time than the Household Tales (then in their third edition), and they were working on a comprehensive German dictionary at the time of their death. They also compiled collections of folk music and literature, and Jacob did a lot of work in the historical linguistics field. You can view a more-or-less complete list of their works here. In this respect, both brothers were quite prolific in their scholarly outputs, and their efforts did not go unnoticed.

As folklore and fairy tale/'wonder tale' collection and dissemination became the focus of scholarly attention throughout the 1800s, the Brothers Grimm worked in scholarly concert with a growing number of other fairy tale collectors and scholars: Joseph Jacobs and Andrew Lang in the UK/Scotland (as well as John Campbell), Asbjornsen and Moe in Norway, Alexander Afanasyev in Russia, and later, Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (who pioneered the Aarne-Thompson organization/categorization method to categorize tales by "tale types"), along with many others. Various folklore societies and journals were founded throughout the late 1800s as the field grew; Georges mentions that "For literate, urban intellectuals and students of folklore the folk was someone else and the past was recognized as being something truly different." All were working generally for the same reasons: to collect, preserve, study, and disseminate folklore for scholarly reasons (though said specific reasons varied). In this respect, all fairy tale collections were of academic interest, because they were all being collected and published for largely scholarly reasons. However, if you're asking whether or not the Grimm collection was of a particular academic interest or whether it was unique at the time of the first edition's publication, the answer is "no." The Brothers Grimm had much more luck marketing their collection towards the rising literate general public than they did the academic world at the time of publication (even though the collection was originally compiled for academia). The academic interest in various specific collections of tales wouldn't really happen until the early 1900s.

For more information, I would consult the following sources:

• The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar (especially the introductions to each section and the various essays at the back)
  
• The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar
  
• The Annotated Grimms' Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar
  
• When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition, Jack Zipes
  
• “Cross-Cultural Connections and the Contamination of the Classical Fairy Tale,” Jack Zipes (Found in Norton's The Great Fairy Tale Tradition)

(I just wrote out a long answer but accidentally closed the tab, now I am rushed for time to rewrite it so this will be shorter than I had planned)

Great question! We need some more Ireland around this place.

The movement was heavily inspired by Martin Luther King Jr and the American civil rights movement. Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, a former Belfast MP and movement leader, once said:
>The rise of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was directly inspired by events in the United States. Our inspiration to take to the streets in peaceful mass marches came directly from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights marches we saw on television.

The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was founded in 1967 with the hope of ending a variety of anti-Catholic policies: gerrymandering, council housing segregation, discrimination of government jobs, and use of the Special Powers Act that allowed the government to prevent Catholics from speaking-out against it. Following the American movement, the NICRA utilized peaceful protests, sit-ins, boycotts, and picketing, which gained international exposure and support against the continued persecution of Catholics.

Not all loyalists were opposed to the movement but due to the potential presence of paramilitary supporters and Nationalist groups there was a strong suspicion of the true motivations of NICRA. This fear, particularly that improved Catholic rights and political activity would weaken the Loyalist government, was not completely unfounded:
>essential that the civil rights movement include all elements that are deprived, not just republicans, and that unity in action within the civil rights movement be developed towards unity of political objectives to be won, and that ultimately (but not necessarily immediately) the political objective agreed by the organised radical groups be seen within the framework of a movement towards the achievement of a 32-county democratic republic

I cannot speak to the specific rhetoric as I am away from all of my books but there was a healthy use of propaganda on both sides, especially as the Troubles progressed. Murals were a strong visual source of propaganda. Here is an interesting BBC News video on it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/0/24465711. My knowledge on propaganda is more post-Troubles, so I would like to recommend After the Peace, an amazing book on Loyalist murals.


I know this doesn't completely answer your question but I hope it is a decent start. In a few days I will be back home and can properly delve into the nuances of this issue and recommend some amazing books. Furthermore, any citations you need I will provide once home. Thanks for asking!!

TL:DR - The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr and the American civil rights movement.

Since I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the questions right now, I'm going to copy and paste two answers I've given to similar question in earlier threads. (One of which is a copy-and-paste job itself.)


1. General books:

I'm going to copy and paste an answer I once gave to someone who asked me for book recommendations via private message.

>Hi there!

>No Problem! Always glad to help. If you need a quick overview over the topic or are rather unfamiliar with it The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings gives a good first impression. Else Roesdahl's The Vikings is a bit more in depth but with less pictures. There's also Peter Sawyer's Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings. All three of those are slightly outdated but they give a great first impression of the Age. If money's thight, start with Sawyer, then Roesdahl, then the atlas.

>If you want to go more in depth there's The Viking World by Stefan Brink and Neil Price. Do not confuse it with the book of the same name by Graham-Campbell and Wilson, which is rather outdated. This "Viking World" is a collection of essays by the world's leading experts on the period an the de facto standard of the discipline at the moment. It's well worth the price.

>If you are (or at least read) German (which is possible from your username) try to get the current catalogue of the Haithabu museum. It gives a good overview over that important trading settlement. Or even better: visit there! (Or any of the large Scandinavian National Museums (Moesgård, Statens Historiska museet, or the Viking ship museums in Roskilde and Oslo, respectively).

>If you are interested in the world of the sagas you can't go wrong with Jesse Byock's Viking Age Iceland.

>If you are looking for a quick ressource or if you have a specific question there's the site of The Viking Answer Lady. She appears to be a reenactor not a scholar but her answers are very well sourced and I have yet to find a major error on her site. Or you can always ask me/post to AskHistorians...

>cheers, wee_little_puppetman


Also, you might want to check out this huge annotated Viking movie list.

There's also a rather good three part BBC series on the Vikings on Youtube.

And for some quick Viking fun there's the animated short The Saga of Biorn.

Oh, one more thing: You might also enjoy Viking Empires by Angelo Forte, Richard Oram and Frederik Pedersen. It goes beyond the traditional end of the Viking Age into the Middle Ages and should therefore tie in nicely to your main interest in the crusades.



2. Sagas

Egils saga and Njáls saga are usually the ones that are recomennded for first time readers. They feel very modern in their narrative structures. Grettis saga is also quite good for a start. And then maybe Laxdæla saga. If you aren't specifically interested in Iceland and want to start with something that conforms more to the public picture of "Vikings" try Eiriks saga rauða, Jómsvíkinga saga or Sverris saga. But afterwards you have to read at least one Icelander saga (i.e. one of the ones I mentioned first)!

Icelandic sagas are fascinating but you have to commit to them. Don't be disappointed if a chapter begins with two pages of the family tree of a minor character! And always keep in mind that this is medieval literature: although it might look like it it is not history. These things were written in the 12th to 14th centuries, even if the take place much earlier!

The short answer is "not as much as it could have." And now for the incredibly long answer...

If you haven't already encountered it, Richard Aldrich's GCHQ is pretty much the definitive history of British SIGINT from the early days of the Government Code & Cypher School through to the role of GCHQ in the post-9/11 intelligence landscape.

Aldrich dedicates an entire chapter to the fraught intelligence-sharing relationship between British intelligence and its allies (but especially the USSR) during the Second World War.

But what you have to understand about ULTRA and similar large-scale SIGINT efforts (like the Venona project in the US) is that they are incredibly secret, even by the standards of intelligence work. Breaking your rivals' encrypted communications is a colossal intelligence coup, but it's one that has to be handled incredibly carefully — because if you tip them off to the fact that their secure communications aren't so secure, they're just going to change up and then you're back to square one. SIGINT sources of intelligence are usually kept within as small a circle as possible even within a country's government intelligence community, let alone internationally.

The important thing to note is that at no point in their alliance were Britain, the US and the Soviet Union not spying on each other. Their wartime alliance was one of strategic expediency, not of friendship. Stalin's extreme mistrust of the West, and the corresponding Anglo-American wariness of Stalin and communism meant that it was often a tense partnership.

The KGB and GRU (military intelligence) had some access to the Ultra work being done at Bletchley Park because they had at least two well-placed agents: John Cairncross, a civil servant and intelligence officer who worked at Bletchley Park for part of the war, and Anthony Blunt, an intelligence officer who was one of the MI5 liaison officers to GC&CS. Cairncross and Blunt were two of the Cambridge Five, probably the most successful spy ring ever operated by the Soviet Union — although, interestingly, neither knew that the other was also a Soviet agent.

Here's Aldrich on the debate over whether to share intelligence with the Soviet Union after the outbreak of war between the USSR and Germany in 1941:

> Hitler's decision to turn east was a fabulous stroke of luck for Britain. [...] However, Bletchley Park now faced a new problem. Should it pass sensitive intelligence derived from Ultra to the new Soviet ally, which had been a dedicated enemy of Britain since 1917? The idea that two of Britain's adversaries were about to fight to the death filled most military intelligence officers with ill-disguised glee. Many argued that passing sigint to the Soviets was pointless, since few expected them to hold out later than 1942. Others insisted that not even Ultra could penetrate the fog of self-deception with which Stalin had surrounded himself.
>
> In the event, Bletchley Park did develop a precarious sigint liaison with the Soviets. [...] They intended to send an officer from Bletchley [to Moscow], and in the long term even hoped to persuade the Soviets to accept a British Y unit, or forward listening station, that would intercept German tactical messages on their front. In late 1941 the Soviets agreed to a visit from Squadron Leader G.R. Scott-Farnie, who worked on Britain's Y interception system in the Middle East.
>
> Scott Farnie gave the Soviets a good deal of information on low-grade German Air Force systems, but quickly came up against a different culture of intelligence exchange. The Soviets adored captured documents, and did not attach much credence to any information that was not supported by such evidence.

And here's Aldrich's account of British attempts to warn the Soviets of how insecure their own communications were:

> The main worry about giving Ultra to the Soviets was the insecurity of their own cyphers — in 1942, Bletchley Park was increasingly aware of the German ability to read a great deal of Soviet operational military traffic in the field. Frederick Winterbotham, who worked on sigint distribution, argued that Moscow simply had to be told about the weak security of its cyphers. However, Winterbotham's colleagues insisted that it was 'impossible' to tell the Soviets, even though he had 'invented a good cover story' to explain how they knew. [...]
>
> [...]
>
> On 16 June 1942, Nigel de Grey, the Deputy Director at Bletchley Park stepped in and settled the argument. He noted that Edward Crankshaw, the GC&CS liaison with the Soviets, would soon be returning to Moscow for another visit. He would be ordered to give the Soviets the details of their compromised cyphers and 'the methods of reading'. [...]
>
> In August 1942, Crankshaw briefed the Soviets on their appalling lack of security, typified by their alarming tendency to use low-grade cyphers for high-grade secrets. There was abundant evidence of this in German Air Force Enigma, but Crankshaw only hinted at it by 'somewhat tenuous means'. Predictably, the Soviets would not accept his warnings because 'direct evidence was not forthcoming'. Depressed, he went back to Bletchley Park in February 1943, never to return to Moscwo.

So the Soviets were offered intelligence, but frequently failed to acknowledge its validity or exploit it — just as MI6 and their own agents had been ignored when they warned that Germany intended to invade Russia in the spring of 1941. This is partly due to Soviet intelligence culture, and the pervasive mistrust of Britain (which was still more commonly viewed as an enemy than an ally), but it's also related to the broader culture of paranoia and delusion that characterised Stalin-era Russia.

In terms of broader reading in this area: Britain currently has several of the world's leading intelligence historians, so there's been a lot of excellent scholarship on British and Soviet intelligence history published in the last twenty or so years. In the texts below, you'll find a huge amount of information on the intelligence war before and during the Second World War, and then throughout the Cold War.

As well as the Aldrich history of GCHQ, there are also recently-published official histories of the other two British intelligence services, written by professional historians who were given unprecedented access to the services' archives:

• Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service (2010)
  
• Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2009)
  
  On the Soviet side, Andrew has written several important histories of the KGB, working with two of the most senior Soviet intelligence officers to defect to the west — Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin. They're excellent reads, and incredibly informative on the history, practice and thinking behind Soviet intelligence during the Cold War:
  
  
• Christopher Andrew & Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (1990)
  
• Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (2000)
  
• Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (2005)

>bigger navy's

I don't think there were any larger navies, really. All of my books are packed up at the moment, but I am pretty sure the Royal Navy was, by far, the largest. It came at a price, though. The British army, by comparison, was small and much less effective. The British could afford to neglect their land forces, by comparison, because they for the most part, no longer had enemies that could invade by land.

Because of this, too, especially during the Napoleonic Wars, British sailors and officers were much more experienced than their Spanish and French counterparts, partly because the French Revolution decimated the French naval officer corps, and because French military ships spent most of their time bottled up in port by the British blockade. So, it is why Nelson wanted to sail in close with the French and Spanish at Trafalgar, trusting to superior British gunnery (In that they could fire much faster, thanks to experience) and the greater skill of his officers, to overcome the relatively inexperienced Combined fleet.

The French, on the other hand, had to maintain a large army because they were constantly fighting wars in Europe, specifically against their Habsburg rivals in Austria.

Nor did they always win. The most important example of this is the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781, which led to the French blockading Cornwallis in Yorktown, and his eventual surrender during the American Revolution.

In any case, I'm not too knowledgeable about how promotion in the French navy of the period worked (And would love if someone could fill me in on it), but the British had a semi-meritocratic system of filling their officer corps and promotion. British officers started out essentially as apprentice officers, midshipmen. To get their first real promotion, they had to pass an examination conducted by superior officers to achieve the rank of lieutenant, and then had to either distinguish themselves, get lucky, or have family connections in order to receive a post-captainship. Though, once they got there, promotion was determined only by seniority, and as long as they did not die or disgrace themselves, they would eventually end up an admiral.

So, I think it, generally, was a result of Britain's focus on its naval assets (which none of the other powers did to the same extent), it's system of semi-meritocratic promotion, and really, just luck in some of the people that ended up in the Royal Navy, such as Horatio Nelson.

This is really a question that can't be answered in such a short post. There are tons of books about the subject. Some works that are on the general subject are Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century, pretty much any of the books by N.A.M Rodgers on the subject. John Keegan also talks a bit about it in his chapter on Trafalgar in The Price of Admiralty

I hope the post helps. I don't think I really can do it justice in this format, though. Plus, I just kinda woke up, so I am not sure if my brain is completely on at this moment!

Saloons were by nature diverse. Communities of any reasonable size would have more than one to cater to the diverse population of the community - to market to a niche. In Virginia City, Nevada, where I helped a team of archaeologist excavate four saloons, we found a great deal of variation - both in the historical record conducting research in anticipation of the excavations and in the artifact assemblage yielded by the excavation themselves.

The answer to your question must, then, be framed by the very real fact that there was no typical saloon. The community boasted 100 saloons - the exact number varied over time - the community probably never exceeded 25k, including its southern neighbor. In reality, Virginia City proper probably averaged around 10k from 1863 to 1883.

It had all sorts of saloons, although most only survived a few months as these small businesses attempted to exploit a unique niche and then invariable failed to attract enough business. Twenty or so of the saloon became old standards of the community.

Of the spectrum of possibilities, many were divided up by ethnicity. Others offered special forms of entertainment - billiards, games of chance, or target practicing (always to be recommended: drinking heavily and then having target practice in a long narrow, crowded business establishment!). Others focused on different foods. One offered the latest newspapers with your drink, and yet another cut hair, shaved customers, and served drinks.

To answer your question - finally! - some offered music and other did not. I did not see a lot of boasting about music in period advertisements, however, and that tells me that it may have been more spontaneous among customers. One of our saloons - Piper's Old Corner Bar - included parts of a piano in its archaeological debris, so it is clear that it had one of these instruments. Another of our saloons had the mouthpiece of a mid-range brass instrument - the sort of thing would be played with a baritone or trombone. This was at the Boston, our African American establishment. It's unclear if the instrument was played there or if it was simply owned by a patron who played (there was an African American brass band in the community).

But that second example gets us to another piece of evidence. I'm transcribing the diaries of Alf Doten, a journalist who worked in the mining district for decades. He describes impromptu musical jam sessions in all sorts of places. He played banjo and flute and he sang. He and his friends would create their own music just about anywhere - in homes, but also in saloons where they drank. So it seems clear to me from this and other primary records, that patrons often brought their own music. A place like Piper's may have had a piano, but it may not have had a piano player on staff (old John Piper was probably notoriously cheap and probably would not pay someone to play). My guess is that Piper had the piano as one of his attractions, knowing that many patrons would play and would enjoy the chance to make some music - all the while his other patrons enjoyed the tunes. That is probably how this sort of thing usually happened.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have additional questions.

For sources, I recommend a book written by the lead archaeologist at two of our digs - who went on also to analyze the material from the other two establishments we excavated: Kelly Dixon, Boomtown Saloons: Archaeology and History in Virginia City (2006). I then digested all of this into an overview of a variety of aspects of material culture from the community with my Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past (2012).

For the OP, there were ways of making steel into sheets or at least plates in the later middle ages and early modern period: water-powered trip hammers. You can see an early modern in action shaping a billet of steel in Sweden here and can see a fairly realistic rendering in the background of this very allegorical painting of Venus visiting the forge of Vulcan asking him to forge the armour of Aeneas. It may have been used for rough shaping by actual armourers, but it could also (and perhaps more importantly) be used to flatten blooms of steel or iron into plates that were more easily worked. By contrast, rolling steel is a 17th century process, more or less, and so was not used for most of the period that plate armour was used.

I'm going to answer this separately since it's actually a bit different than the question in the OP. If you're talking about a historical method of making armour finished that doesn't involve some combination of cold and hot work with a hammer, no, there isn't any good evidence for such a process being used historically, at least none I've seen that's convincing. The only alternative I can think of to hammering out plate armour is stamping it using a kind of dye, which is both much more coplex from your perspective and something that I have yet to see evidence for. Probably the best writing I've seen on the historical methods of armourers at the forge is the Phd Thesis of Nickolas Dupras, which analyzed tool inventories, other written accounts and most importantly the actual hammer marks on surviving armours to try to determine working methods. In no examples that he analyzed were there any signs that the metal was shaped by anything other than a hammer. Now, in his Phd Thesis Matthias Goll did argue for some kind of water-powered stamping mechanism, but the argument he presents for this is tenuous, involving the similarities of surviving pieces (it's possible that some armours were hammered on forms that would contain the basic shape of say, a breastplate but that is different), a rather strained reading of an allegorical biography of Maximilian I and little else that I can recall, though it has been some time since I read the thesis.

Regarding the last part, the laborious work of polishing? That's also inevitable, unless you want to make an armour 'rough from the hammer'. Historians like Tobias Capwell estimate that polishing was the majority of labor hours in producing plate armour, and then as now armourers tried to use labor saving devices like polishing wheels powered by water (at least by circa 1500).

Fortunately for you if you are simply seeking to make armour most modern armourers seem to take advantages of alternative means of heating steel like various gas torches, so your ability to forge something in this day and age isn't restricted by the size of your actual forge. There are a number of books and how-tos on making armour, many of them not very good and pretty much all of them more about creating the right look than using the right methods. However the best of the lot is still probably Techniques of Medieval Armour Reproduction: The Fourteenth Century. You may want to try to do things 'the real way' and that's admirable but frankly it's very difficult to do it in this day and age - raw materials are too different and moreover the whole way armourers work has changed due to changes in the labor market. Modern armourers are solitary artisans that do all steps themselves. By contrast medieval and early modern armourers were working in workshops with multiple people - at least a couple or a handful, but as many as dozens, and they were working in a larger community of artisans that could allow for division of labor and economies of scale. This made shaping steel, finishing it and polishing it all using hand or water-powered tools and (char)coal fired forges for heat more feasible than it is for a single person working in their backyard, garage or shed today. That larger social context is something we need to think about whenever we think about reconstructing objects from the past or trying to learn about historical methods of craft through practicing our trades in the modern day.

Caveat: I am not an armourer.

Ok, in addition to the paper/booklet posted earlier from acedemia.edu about the lorica segmentata here are some other resources discussing armor and some on metal work techniques. Much of what is available is medieval period but many of the skills and techniques are similar.
On Divers Arts by Theophilus is a treatise on painting, glass making, and metalwork from roughly 1122ad. ISBN:978-0486237848

De Re Metalica by Georgius Agricola is a scientific book on mining and metallurgy from around 1556ad. ISBN: 978-0486600062

The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio is a treatise on metallurgy and alchemy/chemistry from 1540ad. ISBN:978-0486261348

Techniques of Medieval Armor Reproduction: The Fourteenth Century is an awesome book covering various metalwork techniques as applied to making 14th century armor. ISBN: 978-1581605365 He talks about tools you will need and some modifications to make to them for ease of use. He even gives you some ideas on finding good sources for drawing inspiration from for your armor patterns. If you are starting with making armor and don't have anyone nearby to help you learn this is a good guide to buy.

Best of the Hammer is a black and white series of booklets that have great info on medieval metalwork from chainmail to bladesmithing. ISBN:978-0943228044

Roman Body Armor, by Hilary & John Travis is a good re-examining of the data on Roman armor up until this point. ISBN: 978-1445608037

The classic image of the Roman shield, or scutum, is one of the most iconic images of the Roman Empire. It was one of the biggest contributors to the success of Roman legions on the battlefield due to its invaluability in defense and offense. Along with the short sword gladius, the two could take down the most formidable opponent.

• Where does the classic image of the Roman Infantry shield come from?
  
  It comes from the standard army shield during the Roman Empire. This shield has evolved drastically overtime - at first, it was oval and flat because early Romans (pre-Samnite Wars) fought in phalanx formation. These shields would look similar to the Greek [shield](http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/NjAwWDYwMA==/$(KGrHqF,!oUFB0VfBy50BQeGpUJT6w~~60_35.JPG?set_id=880000500F). However, after the Romans adopted their classic manipular system, these shields became obsolete. They slowly evolved to a larger, elliptical shield (probably similar to the Samnites) and then to a more cylindrical shield that almost entirely protected the user. This is the classic shield you are thinking of. This shield was in use during the best (opinion) times of the Romans, from the middle Republic to the middle Empire. The scutum of the Late Roman Empire was elliptical and flat. I'm actually not sure why they changed it, as my knowledge of the Late Empire is not as thorough, but if I could guess (so take this with a grain of salt) it would be because the Romans relied heavily upon mercenaries later on. Perhaps the later shield was more akin to what the mercenaries were used to, I don't know, or maybe there was a heavy Eastern influence since the Eastern Roman Empire became the focal point in the Mediterranean. I should let someone answer that.
  
  
• How much variation in pattern was there?
  
  So this is cool - each legion had its own symbol, and this symbol would be on their shields. During the Battle of Thapsus, Caesar's fifth legion withstood and repelled an elephant charge and was rewarded with the symbol of the elephant. This would give great pride to all members of the legion and be a reminder of when they performed at their bests, so they would put this symbol on their shields. Another example is that some shields have a wreath on them, the Roman symbol for victory. So this guy, on his shield is a wreath, meaning victory, and a bull, which is a common symbol of many Roman legions, like Caesar's third legion. These shields were very important to a Roman warrior and were highly decorated to signify the strength of the Romans and give pride to the man wearing it. Hope that helps!
  
  Sources - primarily Roman Warfare (Smithsonian History of Warfare)
  
  edit* cause my jokes aren't funny, also sources

The Romans had a highly established logistical system. Every province was responsible for maintaining a series of depots and when imperial armies marched through, they could requisition food and equipment while maintaining a minimal supply train. Additionally, the Romans could build up supplies of all kind in advance of campaigns: food, animal feed, equipment, horses, beasts of burden, etc. According to various papyri (see the papryi from Panopolis), when Constantius II was preparing to campaign against Julian, 120k metric tons of wheat in Brigantia and 3 million in the Cottian Alps were to prepared in advance. During the republican era, Roman armies were fed by allied states or were delivered by the state. Having the Mediterranean Sea and lands plentiful in rivers in your backyard makes moving enormous amounts of supplies very easy. The lands where the Rhine legions were stationed couldn't possibly feed them at all and so the state had to bring in enormous amounts of food every month. Using the Saône, Moselle, and Rhine Rivers, you can move grain almost entirely by water. The Romans during the republican era also maintained a series of supply depots. If necessary, the Romans would send out foraging parties but this was only a short term solution. If you want to read more on Roman logistics, I recommend the book The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 B.C.-A.D. 235).

Logistics in Alexander the Great's time wouldn't have been that enormously different from the Romans. Again, it helped that he used captured Persian food stores to feed his army. His rapid campaign also resulted in the rapid political disintegration of the Persian government and Alexander won over former enemies pretty rapidly; this would have solved his supply problem pretty quickly. To read more on this subject, please see Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army.

Hannibal relied heavily on his Italian allies to feed his army. People seem to forget that when Hannibal invaded Italy, he courted many of Rome's disgruntled allies to his cause. Of course, it also helps that you're invading in rich farmlands.

Much is often made of Napoleon lightening the load of his soldiers so that they could move faster and in doing so, they had to live off the land. This is partly true and partly false. The French had their own series of supply hubs and depots that were stocked up in advance of major campaigns. At the height of his reign, Napoleon also had the advantage of have many allies and vassals who provided for his army. Living off the land was only a temporary solution and it was probably more like part looting part foraging forests for berries and game. If you want to read more on this subject, I recommend Napoleon's Italian Campaigns: 1805-1815.

In pre-industrial warfare, there were simple logistical laws that no army could break.

For starters, there really isn't such a thing as a "middle-class citizen" in the Roman Empire. Roman social classes did not work that way, and wealth actually had less bearing on your existence than social status, inherited mainly from your ancestors.

The best resource for this sort of thing would be Jerome Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome. Carcopino was the premier classical social historian of his day, and most of what he says is still very much to date. To say more than that would honestly not get you anywhere. The lives of citizens varied pretty wildly depending on social status, wealth, and of course location (life within the city would be very different from life in certain provinces, which would differ even more from each other). A very few things can be said in general, however. The vast majority of the Roman Empire was enjoying the benefits of peace, a blessing that was not lost on them after nearly a hundred years of civil wars and nearly a hundred and fifty years of political strife within the noble orders. The reign of Augustus was also blessed with an extreme degree of wealth, which Rome and her empire had not seen the likes of before, and which was even more welcome considering the extreme deprivation that most people had suffered duing the destructive civil wars. Among the lower social orders the climate of Augustus' reign from the period after the War of Actium was incredibly welcome, providing great social freedom and opportunity, as well as unheard-of wealth. The upper social orders, mainly the survivors of the nobility, were a mixed bag. Most of the remaining prominent members of the senate and nobility had originally been lowlives under Caesar or Octavian, and had joined them because they had hoped that supporting them would help pay off their massive debts from extravagance. The rest were the few survivors of the old nobility that had been sure to kiss up to the dictators, as well as aspiring tyrants like Pompey and Crassus. Since the beginning of the 1st Century, B.C. the political climate at Rome had increasingly been one of power slipping more and more firmly into the hands of private individuals, and as a result there were throughout the century great purges, either through proscriptions or wars, of the members of the nobility. As a result, there was great dissatisfaction with Augustus' seizure of power among the nobles, but for them Rome was rather like a police state, since any disloyal actions would result in Praetorians knocking on their doors. These attitudes are echoed by Virgil and Livy, who had mixed feelings about Augustus, by Cicero (for example, in his Philippics--although all of this is technically before Augustus' reign, it still very much applies, as the loss of political freedom had already been cemented in place following Caesar's victory over the Pompeians), and even by Horace, who owed Augustus and Maecenas everything but who nevertheless could not quite bring himself to agree with the autocracy. For more on the destruction of the Roman political system, see Ronald Syme's groundbreaking work, The Roman Revolution, which was the first study (on the eve of Hitler's declaration of war, to whom Augustus is implicitly compared) to challenge the old Victorian view of Augustus as the "benign dictator."

Oh my yes. I preface this by saying that this is by no means negative, many great societies spread early through conquest.

Early Islamic Civilization was spread by an active and fully endorsed series of conquests, which were then carried on by his successors. The original title of Muhammad's successors was even al-Mu'minin, Commander of the Believers, it was an interesting combination of religion and militaristic action.. If a city or group just surrendered, they would be happily absorbed by the growing nation

Though shortly after his immediate successors (about 100 years after Muhammad's death) it became more politically motivated, and though conquest was the most common way the religion was spread, it was really used as an excuse for rulers to stake a claim (like Christianity)

For further info, check out Muhammad and the Believers by Fred Donner

The history of Islamic Civilization is both extremely fascinating and confusing, its good stuff.

> When referring to this time period its better to refer to the culture in question as Norse, over Viking. Viking actually only cover a particular (very part time) profession, namely a combination of Pirate and Trader. The name Viking is actually derived from a Old Norse verb, describing the action of what we modernly call Vikings actually did. I'll stop now...

Sub-question: do historians care about this distinction? Because as far as I'm aware, it's an entirely acceptable colloquialism. I see serious book titles referencing the "viking age" all the time, I see archaeologists happily calling settlers and explorers "vikings", and I see general reference books happily discussing that while "viking" does have a technical meaning rooted in a specific language, it's become a common term for all sorts of people originating in early medieval scandinavia.

So, do they care? Because I'm pretty certain they didn't back in the 80s, based on my subjective reading of book titles like "the viking dig" which often have nothing to do with sea-borne raiders, and on the way in which I see modern finds relating to the same people normally called "viking". To me it just makes sense not to worry about it.

The average legionary never rose very far up the ranks. However, if you knew people back in Rome or farther up the hierarchy in the army, then you had a much better chance of getting promoted. An exception to my opening sentence is the emperor Maximinus Thrax. He was a normal legionary who became emperor when his legion assassinated the current emperor and elevated him to the position.

Veterans were still very good soldiers right up through their forties.

I'm going to recommend Adrian Goldsworthy's The Complete Roman Army because it's frankly quite good and an excellent starting point into the world of the Roman military. If you want some heavier primary sources, Vegetius, Josephus, and several other writers speak in great detail on the Roman army.

As other contributors to this subreddit have pointed out: there is no single volume of global history that is considered a standard overview work, but I'd like to address the second part of your question:

How could you feasibly go about getting an overview about History, with an eye towards diving deeper into certain aspects that catch your interest?

The simple, pessimistic answer is this: You can't. Even though I have spent years studying history at university I would never claim to have an overview of global History through all eras. And I'm pretty certain that you'd be hard pressed to find someone who does, even if you polled distinguished professors with decades of experience in researching global history. At most I'd be merely uncomfortable - in my particular case - claiming that I have a decent grasp on trends and general goings-on in 19th and 20th European political history, but knowing that there are big and glaring holes I know about and countless other gaps and holes I am not even aware of not being aware of. This stems from the way history is researched and written about, which in turn is determined by the what history as a discipline actually tries to be.

History is a staggeringly ludicrous and gloriously arrogant undertaking, since - in essence - history as a discpline might have any human endeavour big or small as its subject matter, as long as we have sources deemed fit for historical studies - mainly written ones, supplemented by archeaological findings, pictures, video and many others. This leads to a multude not only of questions asked, but of ways to ask questions.

You will find books attempting to give an overview about the decline of one political entity, the impact of events worldwide on a tenously defined trend like "The Birth of the Modern World", the history of particular political projects causing untold suffering in the "Bloodlands", a microhistorical analysis of the thoughts and environment of a particular miller in Italy and many, many more.

The questions you ask and how you ask them shape what portion of history you carve out to examine. Is the author trying to extract the strand of one particular subject (which might be anything from the transatlantic slave trade to eating habits) from a longer time period? Is the author endeavoring to examine a short period of time, trying to give readers insight into all different aspects of this period they deem important? Or is the author switching approaches regularly in a complex attempt to answer a particular question?

In short: trying to get an overview is - in my opinion - impossible, since there are always new ways to approach answering a question, new questions to ask or new ways to ask older questions. So we might as well not bend over backwards to try and achieve the impossible.

But there is no reason to give up trying to read history, since the very way history as a discipline operates is very conducive to leading curious readers from one subject to the next.

So here is my proposal: Don't try to get an overview; you will only end up frustrated and drowned in material. Let your interests guide you naturally. Find a starting point you know about and are interested in and just see where you end up. If you start with wanting to learn about how the 19th century "transformed the world" (as already mentioned by /u/LordOssus) any line of inquiry the authors don't dive too deeply into - or merely mention in passing - might lead you to a vast library of interesting things. In just one "hop" you might go to the changing consumption habit of European societies, from there on to the Slave Trade, the Suffragette Movement, World War I or the political history of Africa before European powers established footholds on the continent. Or a myriad of other directions, to be honest.

In simply following what catches you eye you will, step by step, broaden and deepen your knowledge, which is basically all you can do. So you might as well have fun while you're at it.

During that period it was a balancing act of a few primary factors: speed, guns, and armor. The amount of armor and guns directly impacted both the size and the weight of the vessel, and this in turn effected the speed.

At the time, the pinnacle of tactics during Naval Battles was what is known as "Crossing the T". Essentially, one line of ships would cut-off the other, and in doing so were able to bring all their guns to bear on their opponent. Likewise, their opponent could not bring all of their guns to bear to retaliate. This diagram shows what it would have generally looked like.

For a tactic like that to succeed you needed, as a battleship, a good combination of guns, speed, and armor. A classic example of this would be Admiral Count Heihachiro Togo and his victory over the Russians at Tsuhima in 1904. Both sides had guns that could fire at about the same range (and the bigger the gun, the bigger the range and the more destructive power). William Pakenham, who was a Royal Navy observer on-board Admiral Togo's ship, stated "when 12 inch guns are fired, shots from 10 inch guns pass unnoticed, while, for all the respect they instill, 8 inch or 6 inch might as well be pea shooters". Basically, the goal was to have the biggest guns possible on-board. This provides maximum firepower and range.

Admiral Togo had one more advantage over the Russians: Speed. He had about six or seven knots advantage over the Russians. If you have greater speed and range, then you can determine where and when the fight actually happens - by engaging the enemy from a longer distance and even moving away to keep that advantage. So if you can control those factors you can control the battle.

"Armor is speed" is something Jacky Fisher (important British admiral, key in the conception and design of HMS Dreadnought) is reported as having once said. This is because the more steel you put on the boat, the slower it is going to go. Unless of course you have new and more powerful methods of propulsion/power, which would allow you to attain a higher speed with more weight. Armor of course is important, as your ships need to be able to withstand hits. HMS Warsprite at Jutland for example, sustained 11 hits. While she was severely damage (and ordered home to Roysoth) she survived those hits and lived to see another day (a lot of days to be precise, she was engaged in WWII as well).

As u/Vonadler notes as well, money is a key issue. HMS Dreadnought cost approximately £1,784,000 in 1905. As an upgrade over other ship designs, she only cost £181,000 more. However, you have to multiply that by the amount of ships you want to build and then the number only gets more astronomical. In August 1914, the Royal Navy had 22 Battleships in commission (with 40 Pre-Dreadnoughts which are the older battleship designs that came before the Dreadnought in 1905) with another 13 under construction. And the price had only gone up since 1905. The Germans for example only had 15 built with 5 under construction. However I disagree that Vanguard was about 10 million GBP more to construct. Vanguard was built in the 1940s, 40 years after Dreadnought. Using [this inflation calculator] (http://inflation.stephenmorley.org/) I compared £11,530,503 in 1941 (the year that Vanguard was laid down) to 1905 (the year Dreadnought was laid down). In 1905, Vanguard would have cost about £5,291,677.27 pounds. A substantial increase to be sure, but only of about 297% compared to 546%. The overall point stands however, that bigger Battleships with more armor and whatnot do cost significantly more than their smaller counterparts.

And with ships you do not just have the cost of building. maintenance, crew (in the case of the German Battleships 1000+ crew members), fuel, etc... Those costs add up quickly. u/thefourthmaninaboat is also correct that the infrastructure was also a factor in Battleship design. On the other hand, cruise ships didn't really have to contend with all of this. They had their own design challenges to be sure, but armor for example wasn't really a factor.

This is my first "real" reply on this sub, so I hope it's been helpful and informative!

----------------
Sources

• Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War by Robert K. Massie
  
  
• From Imperial Splendor to Internment: The Imperial German Navy in the First World War by Nicolas Wolz
  
  
• Warships and Sea Battles of World War One published by Beekman House
  
  
• Inflation Calculator

An area that I am interested in (as a hobbyist) is the origin story of Yahweh and Yahweh worship that precedes, and leads to, the Torah. If you are interested some references on the growth of monotheistic Yahwehism from a historical polytheistic foundation of holy scripture to the development of the henotheism and then monotheism of early Biblical Israelites:

• [The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel](http://www.amazon.com/The-Early-History-God-Biblical/dp/080283972X) by Mark Smith<br />

• The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts by Mark S. Smith
  
• A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong
  
• The Religion of Ancient Israel (Library of Ancient Israel) by Patrick D. Miller
  
• Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches by Ziony Zevit
  
• Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Library Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies) by John Day
  
• God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World by Mark S. Smith
  
  While limited to starting with the Hebrew Bible as a basis, and not addressing much pre-Torah scripture related to Yahweh, the following takes a look at:
  
  
• Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible, by Michael S. Heiser, PhD
  
  While a College Senior Thesis (and the perception therefore of a less credible scholarly/appeal to authority level), the following is a good source of other reference material:
  
  
• The Ascension of Yahweh: The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism from the Afrasan to Josiah by Andrew Halladay
  
  Some of the on-line summaries/arguments which related to the above argument/position are:
  
  
• Are Yahweh and El the same god OR different gods?
  
• Ugarit and the Bible
  
• Israelite Religion to Judaism: the Evolution of the Religion of Israel By David Steinberg
  
• The evolution of God

Hi there, I am not a professional naval historian (my master's was in American history, post civil war) but I have read quite a bit on the topic. Several books come to mind:

• I second the Massie recommendations. Here are Amazon links:
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Dreadnought-Robert-K-Massie/dp/0345375564/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370960465&sr=1-1&keywords=dreadnought+massie
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Castles-Steel-Britain-Germany-Winning/dp/0345408780/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370960472&sr=1-6
  
  
• The British historian N.A.M. Rodger has written two naval histories of Britain, which are very accessible. Rodger does a good job of balancing strategy and tactics with the political and bureaucratic matters that make a navy efficient.
  
  The Safeguard of the Sea:
  http://www.amazon.com/Safeguard-Sea-History-Britain-660-1649/dp/0393319601/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370960428&sr=1-3
  
  The Command of the Ocean:
  http://www.amazon.com/The-Command-Ocean-History-1649%C2%AD-1815/dp/0393060500
  
  
• John Keegan wrote a short book, The Price of Admiralty, focusing on the naval battles of Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway, and the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII.
  
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/0140096507
  
  
• There are any number of books on Midway, but one that I enjoyed is Shattered Sword, by Parshall and Tully. They delved deeply into Japanese archives and reconstructed details of flight operations and naval SOP to illuminate the battle in a way that I had not seen before:
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Shattered-Sword-Untold-Battle-Midway/dp/1574889249
  
  And, of course, if you want fiction, both the Horatio Hornblower and the Aubrey-Maturin series are good reads. A-M is a bit more modern lit; Hornblower is entertaining but starts to read a bit older.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Hornblower
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey–Maturin_series
  
  I hope this helps. When I get home I'll take a look at my shelves and see what else comes to mind.

Thanks for the detailed reply. You have clearly given this a lot of thought and so I'm fully prepared to say you may be right in your assessment of some of these historians. I probably haven't read any of the texts you are referring to so I can’t judge them.

I do still think that this is not an issue of peer-review not working. I am clearly giving these hypothetical authors the benefit of the doubt, but if evidence is not discussed in a particular work, then I'd tend to think that both the author and the peer-reviewers were well aware of what was included/excluded and found it sufficient. That doesn’t mean that all the peer-reviewers agreed with the conclusions though. If that was necessary nothing would get published. There is a fine line between making sure an article is fully documented and letting it succeed or fail on its merits. I’ve read many articles that I thought had a gaping hole of evidence, but that doesn’t mean the article shouldn’t be published or that it was biased or misleading. It is still advancing a new way of looking at a particular problem and a new way of marshalling the evidence. And then I can write an article bringing up what was left out and the conversation continues.

However, if you are reading books for a general audience, they often don’t have the same sort of goals that professional works have. They are more like a digest of opinions presented for people who want to “know the facts” more than understand the problem of history and how it’s done. If you’ve been reading books like that and are not satisfied with them, I’d say it’s time for you to jump further in and read the real stuff.

Btw, if you want to read a great book on barbarians that really addresses the problems of historiography (and has none of the frothing at the mouth stuff), try this one. It’s very influential and important.

Keegan's History of Warfare touches on maritime power, but his Price of Admiralty is very good, and much more focused on Naval history. If you want a great memoir of WW2 in the Pacific, I'd recommend With the Old Breed by Sledge although this is the Marines, not the Navy specifically.

Just want to give a little bit more detail!

> Lu Bu was considered a good warrior, although I don't remember reading about him slaying 1000 people per battle.

While Lu Bu's actual legacy does not include killing thousands or defeating multiple generals in duels, he was still known as incredibly strong, with especial prowess in archery and horseback riding.

>Cao Cao was not viewed, as I read it, as particularly more evil than anyone else.

Definitely not, the only truly evil thing Cao Cao did was the slaughtering of Xuzhou citizens when he was seeking revenge for his father. Arguably you could say Cao Cao controlling the emperor was "evil" but the Emperor was fair game during these times.

>Sima family (Sima Yi being most prominent in the game and the novel) eventually replaces the Cao family and creates their own dynasty, Jin.

More specifically, Jin wasn't founded until well after Sima Yi's death, when his grandson Sima Yan founded Jin just before conquering Wu.

>I highly recommend both Records and Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you're into that era.

If anyone is interested in reading ROTK, I highly recommend the Robert Moss translation. People tend to read the free version online which is not translated as well.

Food is a universal motivator. What if you had students research historical cooking? And after a week or two, you have each student bring in a recipe they've prepared from historical period/culture of their choice? And also give a presentation or write a short paper about how the food came about, or how it influence history and culture.

I've recently been trying recipes from this blog about recreating ancient Roman cuisine. Not exactly an academic source, but does cite the passages from Roman writings that inspire his exploits.

The book Salt: A World History would also be a great source, and is very easy-to-read and IMHO quite interesting. Many parts of it would make good excerpts for reading in class and introducing ideas. The same author has similar books on Cod and Oysters.

I'm no expert, I'm just stealing this idea because it's an assignment that I was given in High School, and was one of the most memorable and fun.

I had the chance to finish fully reading Roman Warfare by Adrian Goldsworthy, and I want to start off by saying that if you are even remotely interested in how the Roman military operated, read this book. Doesn't matter if you're interested in Rome before city states were a thing, whether you're into the Principate, or whether you want to know how the Roman army degenerated evolved into its later stages preceding the collapse of the Roman Empire. Whichever way you look, this book has you covered - and, of course, I can't help but mention that I really, REALLY like Goldsworthy's style. That might have something to do with it. I'm going to probably work on a re-read when I'm done with my current book, which happens to be...

[Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization], by Richard Miles. This one is a bit dryer and FAR longer than Roman Warfare, but VERY cool, too! I'm only a little ways in (maybe 20%?), but Miles gives some GREAT background on the founding of Carthage, exploring the history of Tyre as well to give context to the founding of the great city. Which, I might add, I firmly believe should be rebuilt. Make the inner buildings a mixture of modern and Carthaginian style, get the plastered walls that shine in the sun, get the temple and the palace and the INCREDIBLE harbour...it would make Tunisia one hell of a place to visit :D

Armorer here. Not sure of your skill level, but Brian Price's Techniques Of Medieval Armour Reproduction is a required text for any armorer.

The Armour Archive is also a terrific resource for pretty much everything armor related with tons of very experienced folks that can answer pretty much any question you may have.

What are you looking to make?

It's been a while since I read the book, but at the time I had strong feelings against the book, and this hasn't changed in the year since. First of all, it has to be said that Holland is a very engaging writer and I enjoyed his other books thoroughly, though perhaps it was because I'm not so familiar with other periods of history. At the very least, he writes excellent popular history and though his arguments in this book is controversial, it in my opinion brought more public attention to a very exciting and interesting field, which is no bad thing! This is also a flaw though, since he can get a bit too into his rhetoric, which is great for the reader, but obscures the complexities of the problems he deals with.

The key element of Holland's argument, that Islamic sources are not reliable, is not contested in modern Western scholarship, but the problem is that some historians, such as Patricia Crone, go too far and argue that they should be dismissed altogether. Holland unfortunately followed this approach blindly even though he's not an expert in this field. The book Hagarism by Crone and Michael Cook is the most obvious example of the views of these ultra-sceptics. It is a fascinating read, suggesting that based on contemporary non-Islamic sources, Islam was a Jewish splinter sect (with Samaritan influences) that became its own religious force in the reign of Abdul al-Malik in the late seventh century; Muhammad was a secular leader who got turned into a prophet by his successors when they realised that they need an alternative form of legitimacy after their ties with Judaism became strained. However, even though Islamic sources were written down at least a century after the events they described and some were obvious forgeries, I still think that SOME facts about Muhammad's life were passed down orally. Hagarism also used a shoddy methodology and its main argument about Islam being a Jewish sect relies on three sources: a contemporary Armenian history, a Byzantine anti-semitic pamphlet and a Jewish apocalyptic work. The first two would obviously cast Islam as a brand of Judaism, because contemporaries were unbelievably anti-semitic and Jews were the obvious scapegoat for any Byzantine misfortune, whilst the last source is hardly a reliable one. As far as I'm concerned, I'm willing to concede that Muhammad's early followers formed some kind of an ecumenical group that included Jews and Christians (as Fred Donner argued) since there are plenty of evidence for inter-faith co-operation and influence, but Islam being a Jewish sect or Muhammad not claiming to be a prophet? They don't mesh well with our sources at all.

Most modern historians are aware of the flaws of Islamic sources and always take care to compare these sources with other contemporary writings. Two historians who used this approach recently, James Howard-Johnston and Robert Hoyland, both came to the conclusion that Islamic traditions are generally accurate, though some dates/events were fudged to suit the religious/political sensibilities of the chroniclers, which is hardly surprising. A few others still use these sources uncritically (such as Hugh Kennedy, whose book on the Islamic conquests is excellent, but I still cringe a bit at the uncritical approach to sources he used), but generally, I get the impression that the consensus is somewhere in the middle, with historians using Islamic sources carefully to reconstruct early Islam, rather than following blindly or dismissing them altogether.

There are still some exciting theories floating around, but they are based on hard evidence. Most recently, Stephen Shoemaker's Death of a Prophet argued that Muhammad led an ecumenical movement of followers of various Abrahamic religions and was involved in early attacks on Palestine (rather than dying in Medina before the Islamic conquest as conventional accounts have it) - controversial, but there are contemporary sources that suggest Muhammad did just that. Holland on the other hand did not argue from sources (part of the nature of writing a non-academic book) and was trying to summarise complex theories into one exciting argument. The impression I got was that he was basically re-phrasing Crone's argument by positing an alternate home-city for Islam and de-emphasising the role of Muhammad as a prophet, but it was an argument that has generally been dismissed in academia - even though Hagarism was an exciting book to read and was really important in changing historians' perception of early Islam, it had a flawed methodology and I much prefer Crone's later works, which were still sceptical, but were more nuanced and actually looked at more than three sources.

> This is also probably the most boring aspect of eunuchs to me to be honest! It's like you study the history of steamships and everyone asks what iron they used.

There are people out there who would actually find the topic of your metaphor absolutely fascinating! That simple topic could provide a rich history of engineering, business, and politics. These books on the pencil and salt are just two examples of this.

Your best bet is to read some of the newer work in global, transnational, and comparative history, especially in relation to empire.

Buy these two books:

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History

and

C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World (this covers 1780-1914, but trust me, you're gonna want it).

Look through their bibliographies and citations when you come across something you're interested in. Then ask again when you have ideas about more specific topic areas.

Fred Donner's new book Muhammad and the Believers goes to some lengths to answer this question. While I'm not an expert in this time period, I can tell you that it takes a few centuries, even as late as the 14th century before you have something close to a majority Muslim population in the Arab territories, Persia and Anatolia. Even then, by the time the Ottoman Empire reached its height in the 16th century, it probably ruled over more Christians than Muslims.

Some factors that you could consider as increasing the Muslim quotient in this part of the world include the legal incentives you mention and also things like slavery, which resulted in non-Muslims being enslaved, converted and eventually released. Aside from legal incentives, there were also social incentives such as access to schooling, which in many areas meant an Islamic school of one stripe or another, and access to other social services.

For your bonus question, the two are tied pretty closely. This is due to the fact that Arabic as the pure language of God is given a paramount place in the religion. Education in the Islamic system begins with the learning of Arabic, so its vernacularization inevitably came along with conversion.

>Germanic people all originated in Scandinavia whether it's the Angles, Vandals, Goths, Lombards, Geats, Saxons, practically everyone.

Early medieval historians popularized this narrative (as did Tacitus several crnturies before), but there's good reason to treat these accounts with a lot of skepticism. Each was much more concerned with making myths designed to influence contemporary disputes than they were with reconstructing ancient (and almost entirely unverifiable) migration routes.

You can still find a lot of texts treating Germanic migrations out of Scandinavia as established events, but the evidence to support this is extremely patchy and, at best, problematic.

The current consensus has long (since Wenskus' Stammesbildung in the 60s) moved toward recognizing that barbarian tribes are very malleable, and that new groups were formed from new leaders assembling the dispersed inhabitants whose farmsteads losely filled the forests of Germania into new coalitions, rather than these people migrating out of Scanza (etc) as ready-made people groups. For example, Kulikowski's Romes Gothic Wars (which summarizes these questions in a user-friendly manner for the origin of the Goths on the fringes if the Roman empire, rather than out of a long migration out of Scandinavia).

A History of God by Karen Armstrong is a pretty good and accessible text about how the God concept changed over time

I'll suggest two:

Augustus: Introduction to the Life of an Emperor (Karl Galinsky). This is recent, realistic but not jaundiced.

The Roman Revolution. This is a classic work, tough to read, now old, but a very interesting way of getting at the character and life of Augustus (by examining the course of events rather than dissecting his background and personality).

I'm not personally fond of Everitt's work. He seems to make unfounded conjectures (like his speculation at the beginning of his book on Augustus) and unjustifiable statements (like calling Cicero Rome's greatest politician...that one belongs to Augustus.)

Do you want to stick with Roman stuff? Because Thucydides (history of the Peloponnesian War) is amazing. It is dealing with Greece centuries before the Romans got going, but really fascinating. This is a great way to read it as well, with lots of maps and diagrams and such.

If you want to stick with Roman: Caesar Civil Wars is ok, but I think you find it less compelling than Gallic Wars. You might enjoy the early books of Livy, about the beginnings of Rome. The Roman historian Sallust also has two different monographs: one of the War with Catiline and one about the Jugurthine War in Africa. The latter one might be of interest to you. link

I think "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong is a pretty good start; it covers Judaism, Christianity and Islam. About the ancient christian movements before Roman Catholicism, I'd suggest you "Lost Christianities" by Bart D. Ehrman. (In fact, I'd suggest to read all his books, they're awesome)

About the different branches of christianity, I'd suggest you to study the history of the Protestant Reformation. I'm not sure about the history of Christianity in the U.S... here's a wild guess based only on the reviews: A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada by Mark A. Noll.

I would suggest you read (assuming your an English speaker) the book itself! There are many translations available, the one I read was the translation by Robert Moss. Also there is the actual historical text that the novel was based on, Records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou, for that I would recommend checking out any university libraries in your area.


And also I'll ping /u/cthulhushrugged for a better answer.

From the Harper Encyclopedia of Military History, 4th Ed, pp. 89-90:

The typical army of the Ch'in and Han periods was a combined arms force of infantry, cavalry, chariots, and crossbowmen. The principal element had been heavy armored infantry, but increasing reliance was placed on cavalry as time went by. Shih Huang Ti did not introduce the crossbow into Chinese armies, since we know that these weapons were in extensive use as early as the Battle of Ma Ling (353 BCE). He seems, however, to have relied upon crossbowmen more heavily than his predecessors and may have been responsible for establishing a substantial contingent of mounted crossbowmen in his army. He also coordinated the employment of the reflex longbow with the crossbow, but (unlike the Mongols) does not seem to have had mounted longbowmen.

The combined arms concept seems to have been adopted for units as small as a 1,000 man equivalent of a modern regiment. Thus, the Chinese appear to have been able to deploy units capable of decentralized, independent action, as well as to combine them into large, massed, but articulated armies, in which the major units were brigades of 2 or 3 regiments. Heavy armored infantry predominated. Light unarmored infantry--archers, crossbowmen, and spearmen--functioned as skirmishers and provided security by screening flanks and rear.

The bulk of the soldiers, infantry and cavalry alike, had bronze-tipped--or iron-tipped--spears as their primary weapons. The secondary weapon for most soldiers, archers or spearmen, mounted or dismounted, was a single-edged sword nearly three feet long, suspended in a scabbard from a waist belt. All, except apparently for lightly-armed skirmishers, wore armor made up of small metal (bronze) plates attached by a form of rivent to a quilted fabric base. Some protection seems to have been provided even those without armor by a heavy quilted robe. The Chinese apparently relied entirely upon their armor for passive protection and did not carry shields.

Op. cit., p. 134:

The Han Dynasty inherited the government and military institutions of the Ch'in Dynasty. The basis of Han military power was the militiaman. Han law required males between the ages of 23 and 56 to undergo on month of military training each year at provincial training centers. Each man was also required to serve a 1-year tour with the Imperial Guards army in the capital and a 3-year tour at a frontier post. The militia was also called up during local emergencies and for foreign campaigns, such as those of Wu Ti against the Hsiung-nu.

The Roman army structure, equipment, etc under the Principate has been exhaustively documented ad nauseum in many many sources, some of which I'll list below. If asked to compare the two systems, I'd say that the Roman armies were strategically and tactically more flexible, and were by design able to be deployed from one end of the empire to the other for decades on end, versus the inherent limitations of a militia-type system. The testudo and gladius would have likely made the Roman legionary superior to his Han counterpart in melee combat.

However, the crossbow would be the central, pivotal piece of technological difference between the two armies, with its great range and its ability to penetrate virtually all known sorts of personal armor, one would have to conclude that, all else being equal, a Roman army's only chance would involve either a) surprise, or b) tactics wherein the main bodies of the legions closed the distance with the Han to precipitate a melee as soon as possible. This assumes that a crossbow bolt could penetrate the testudo, which seems reasonable, but may not have been true as a rule.

SOURCES:

Goldsworthy, Adrian. The Complete Roman Army. Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Coulston, J.C. Roman Military Equipment: From the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome. Oxbow Books, 2011.

Alexander is tremendously well known for his logistical expertise. Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army is one of the go-to texts about military logistics in the ancient world.

http://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Great-Logistics-Macedonian-Army/dp/0520042727

> So that would just be books recommended, not written yet.

Remind me in 4 months and I'll you my dissertation on the relationship between industrialisation and social change.

Well, the ones I own that are relevant to industrialisation are as follows:

Eric Hobsbawm Age of Revoltution: 1789 - 1848 - Also add in Hobsbawm's next two text books, Age of Capital: 1848-1875, and Age of Empirel: 1875-1914

The Ascendancy of Europe: 1815- 1914

The Birth of the Modern World: 1780 - 1914

Roger Osborne: Iron Steam and Money

Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, Deborah Cadbury

Britain's Industrial Revolution: The Making of a Manufacturing People, 1700 - 1870, by Barrie Trinder

Shropshire's Industrial Revolution, by Barrie Trinder

Books on the textile industry that I've used this year (not done much focus on the textile industry, more the Luddite movement)

The Genesis of Industrial Capital: A Study of West Riding Wool Textile Industry, c.1750-1850

The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 by T.S.Ashton

And just because I mentioned it (can't find the links) the Luddites are covered well by:

"The Risings of the Luddites, chartists and Plug-drawers" by Frank Peel

"The Early English Trade Unions: Documents from the Home Office Papers in the Record Office" by A.Aspinall

"The Luddites: Machine Breaking in Regency England" by M.I.Thomis

"Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England" by Frank Ongley Darvall

This is actually a really good book about salt. It was widely available in little shakers and otherwise, and the supply and demand of it changed world history several times over. He compares it to oxygen - it's something you take for granted but when you don't have it, it's suddenly very, very important.

http://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0142001619/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346953278&sr=1-1

No, the correct answer from any historian would be that salt was used in the preservation of foods an the treatment of wounds, vitally important for armies. I recommend at least a casual perusal of salt.

Curing meat was secondary factor. For most lower class and the poor, salt was simply too expensive to be used to cure meat.

The real reason is this; you would die if you don't eat salt. For example, your nervous system and brain would cease to function if you don't have sodium. Go read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential
Muscle contraction also depend on the sodium channel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_contraction#Skeletal_muscle_contractions

Russia was trying to make rebel's life miserable. It's easy in our age of abundant to forget how precious salt used to be.

Throughout history, salt was a very precious commodity. A lot of societies had salt tax as an important source of government revenue(look up Gandhi's Salt March). You either have to mine it or made it from evaporation of sea water then transport it long distance, making it super expensive.

If you still interested, go read this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0142001619/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344753543&sr=1-1&keywords=salt

A History of God is a good source to explore the polytheistic roots of Judaism. It uses writing style correlation to map "authors" and revisions in the Old Testament and follows the eventual emergence of YAWH as the sole deity of the Jewish people.

Syme's The Roman Revolution is in my opinion still the orthodox text almost 100 years after it was written (1939 I think). There's several biographies of Caesar that come to mind, most powerfully Meier's and Goldsworthy's. Of these two I prefer Meier's, but I think Badian had a fairly scathing review of it published somewhere. The most recent thing I'm aware of (although I haven't read it) is Goodman's Rome's Last Citizen.

And of course there's always Plutarch, Appian, Cicero's letters (which contain some written by and to Cato). I don't think there's any substitute for starting with the ancient sources.

Now's the time to point out that there's a book to answer all your salt-related questions.

Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie

http://www.amazon.com/Dreadnought-Robert-K-Massie/dp/0345375564

I read this one all the way through once and I found it pretty decent. The prose gets extremely cumbersome at times but translating Chinese prose to English prose is absurdly difficult so you take what you can get.

In the book Salt it mentioned India being forced to export salt to the UK at low prices. Was that an isolated incident or were forced (cheap) exports the norm for the empire? If the latter, were the UK consumer savings a significant amount?