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Posted

Dude, I'm totally reading Hitler's Foreign Workers right now too. Do you study forced labor or something?

Yes! It's not my main interest but it's a side interest, along with forced migration in general. I'm reading Hitler's Foreign Workers for the comparative perspective, though, as I'm not a Europeanist at all.

Posted

Yes! It's not my main interest but it's a side interest, along with forced migration in general. I'm reading Hitler's Foreign Workers for the comparative perspective, though, as I'm not a Europeanist at all.

You may want to look at Norman Naimark's book. Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe. I actually do a lot with Czechoslovakia's forced expulsion of Germans after WWII. Good book to start with.

Posted

I'm in between books for fun... I just finished re-reading Pride & Prejudice, and I started Kafka's Metamorphosis but put it aside when I started with grad school apps.. then finals came and I was holding review sessions for my seniors. My library is full of books I intend to read but never find the time for... like Atonement, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Catch 22.

For more serious reading, I'm going through the "Penguin History of Latin America." It's helping fill in gaps of knowledge, especially on Brazil, which I know painfully little about :(

Posted (edited)

I'm reading massive general-popular histories for fun as this is exactly the stuff its hard to justify reading when your on a program.

Just Finished: India after Gandi

Now Reading: Postwar, Europe since 1945

Next: Penguin History of Latin America + Fall and Rise of Modern China

Edited by Irulan
Posted

I'm reading Roger Griffin's Modernism and Fascism and Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism for a seminar on...well...fascism. Other than that, I'm about to start a reader on feminism and post-modernism. I feel like I hardly ever get time to read just for pleasure (and not for class), but one of my New Year's resolutions was to try to make time for just that during the day...right now, I'm kinda failing myself!

Posted

I'm reading massive general-popular histories for fun as this is exactly the stuff its hard to justify reading when your on a program.

Just Finished: India after Gandi

Now Reading: Postwar, Europe since 1945

Next: Penguin History of Latin America + Fall and Rise of Modern China

Postwar is actually a required reading for one of my courses!

Just finished reading Kwame Appiah's In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, and about to start Gaurav Desai's Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library.

Posted

I'm reading massive general-popular histories for fun as this is exactly the stuff its hard to justify reading when your on a program.

Just Finished: India after Gandi

Now Reading: Postwar, Europe since 1945

Next: Penguin History of Latin America + Fall and Rise of Modern China

I'm doing the same thing... Right now it's Merry Wiesner's Early Modern Europe: 1450-1789 and then Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause and then Greenberg's Honor and Slavery:Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South :) I'm looking forward to that one.

Posted

Yes! It's not my main interest but it's a side interest, along with forced migration in general. I'm reading Hitler's Foreign Workers for the comparative perspective, though, as I'm not a Europeanist at all.

Oh okay. I mostly study it in the context of the Holocaust, though mainly dealing with Romania, not Germany. My plan for my dissertation is to compare the German and Romanian labor camps in the Dnestr-Bug-Dnepr region during the war.

Posted

Yes! It's not my main interest but it's a side interest, along with forced migration in general. I'm reading Hitler's Foreign Workers for the comparative perspective, though, as I'm not a Europeanist at all.

And also, if you're interested in forced migration in the European context, there's a good book I've been reading for the same project, Purifying the Nation by Vladimir Solonari, which is about the deportations and population exchanges that took place in Romania during the war as they tried to remove a lot of the non-Romanians from the population. If you're looking for an underused comparative perspective, anyway.

Posted

Just finished reading Kwame Appiah's In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, and about to start Gaurav Desai's Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library.

Appiah's book is a fascinating book and I read it several years ago. I recently picked up Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Social History of Africa Series) by Emmanuel Akyeampong.

Posted

And also, if you're interested in forced migration in the European context, there's a good book I've been reading for the same project, Purifying the Nation by Vladimir Solonari, which is about the deportations and population exchanges that took place in Romania during the war as they tried to remove a lot of the non-Romanians from the population. If you're looking for an underused comparative perspective, anyway.

Thanks! That sounds really interesting. I actually got into two programs late last week, which I totally didn't expect to happen, so now I'm trying to bulk up my reading list so I don't sound like a complete fool when I arrive on campus in August. I will put that one on my list :)

Posted

currently reading the Bible ... gues it's not just foxholes that reaffirms faith :)

Posted

Thanks! That sounds really interesting. I actually got into two programs late last week, which I totally didn't expect to happen, so now I'm trying to bulk up my reading list so I don't sound like a complete fool when I arrive on campus in August. I will put that one on my list :)

Hopefully Romania is decently interesting for you. Just trying to spark some interest in an understudied field.

Posted

For some. I'm proof that there really are foxhole atheists.

I wonder if that would be a decent dissertation? Atheists in the foxhole?

Posted

I wonder if that would be a decent dissertation? Atheists in the foxhole?

Yeah, but it would probably fall more under sociology than history. A friend of mine did her thesis about people leaving Mormonism. That was pretty interesting actually.

Posted

At the moment, Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Brewer, By Birth or Consent, Balogh, Government out of Sight: THe Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America, and Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It.

Something different next week of course ;)

Posted

At the moment, Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Brewer, By Birth or Consent, Balogh, Government out of Sight: THe Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America, and Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It.

Something different next week of course ;)

What's the Napoleon book like? Is it any good?

Posted

What's the Napoleon book like? Is it any good?

It's a fairly good, war and society school military history. He's stretching it I think in some of his effort to drive home points of currency (war on terror, iraq references, things that I don't think will age well). But that's the project. Essentially that the Napoleonic wars were the first modern wars with total mobelization and vast societal changes driven by the enlightenment. As military history trying to be intellectual history it succeeds better than most books.

Posted

It's a fairly good, war and society school military history. He's stretching it I think in some of his effort to drive home points of currency (war on terror, iraq references, things that I don't think will age well). But that's the project. Essentially that the Napoleonic wars were the first modern wars with total mobelization and vast societal changes driven by the enlightenment. As military history trying to be intellectual history it succeeds better than most books.

That level of modern historicity bothers me b/c as you said it is a stretch. Sure there are SOME tangential points that can be connected to modern warfare (i.e., French Revolution to modern day terrorism) but why make the case? Just to sell books? To get a booking on the Daily Show?

Posted

That level of modern historicity bothers me b/c as you said it is a stretch.

Bingo. On the other hand it is trying to engage the larger intellectual movements of the turn of the 18th/19th century. One of my complaints about a lot of miltiary historiography is that it's often so isolated from general history scholarship. At least I find the Society for Military History to be kind of ... I'm not sure how to put my finger on it but it's nothing like what my other professional associations are like.

Posted

Bingo. On the other hand it is trying to engage the larger intellectual movements of the turn of the 18th/19th century. One of my complaints about a lot of miltiary historiography is that it's often so isolated from general history scholarship. At least I find the Society for Military History to be kind of ... I'm not sure how to put my finger on it but it's nothing like what my other professional associations are like.

I forgot to ask you but are you a military historian?

Posted

I forgot to ask you but are you a military historian?

Of an unconventional sort, yes. It's often the second or third field I use to describe myself.

Posted

It was a field I almost considered but there aren't many here that specialize in that ... I would have had to go the Europ History route or Am Civil War or just a modern history etc ... it's all how you look at it really ... I've always loved reading military histories be it Caesar's Gallic Commentaries or the bios of the great warriors of yesteryear etc.

Posted

It was a field I almost considered but there aren't many here that specialize in that ... I would have had to go the Europ History route or Am Civil War or just a modern history etc ... it's all how you look at it really ... I've always loved reading military histories be it Caesar's Gallic Commentaries or the bios of the great warriors of yesteryear etc.

There's Texas A&M, Kansas State and not a whole lot else.

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