Would you rather fight one horse sized Will Shortz or 100 Will Shortz sized horses?

Kyle Harper's book, The Fate of Rome gets into the combination of pandemics and climate change in that area and the impact they might have had on end of Rome. It's not hard to imagine that the changes going on would also impact where the Huns were from.

His book isn't too long and it's very interesting to read. I'd recommend it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34427005-the-fate-of-rome

No, you're right now that I read it more carefully.

There's a few books recently about the Battle of Chosen Reservoir. I know Hampton Sides had one a couple years ago.

Also Bruce Cummings has a fairly popular book on it called The Korean War. It's about a decade old. But he did a post on fivebooks.com recommending 5 books on the war. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/bruce-cumings-on-the-korean-war/

You might want to check out The Bright Ages. It's about misconceptions about the Middle Ages/Dark Ages. The authors did an AMA when the book came out. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rko03c/ama_with_dr_matthew_gabriele_and_dr_david_perry/

I finished Eight Days in May by Volker Ullrich. I liked his biographies of Hitler so I thought I'd give this a chance. It's about the 8 days following Hitler's death. It was interesting, especially as a counterpoint to 5 Days in London by John Lukacs. The translator did a good job on this and the it was a quick read. I learned a little bit about Donitz I didn't know, but my overall picture of him as basically uninspired and a mediocre Nazi were confirmed. He was someone who was so surrounded by mediocrity that he didn't realize how mediocre he was himself.

If you want a short book on the last few days of the war in Europe, this would be a good one to pick up. If you're looking for something that would be a nice airplane read, my guess is the book probably takes about 5ish hours total to read at about 270 smallish pages with decent sized borders.

I read the Logevall bio of JFK recently and the first couple hundred pages are a slog b/c his childhood just isn't that interesting. Especially compared to his Father's life. I am excited for the next volume of that though, which will cover the presidency. This volume ended with the election.

I'd recommend reading this NYRB review of Graeber's work along with the book. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/

I like Graeber and he has a lot of important ideas that are worth considering and testing, but his history isn't always the best.

It's important to remember that trade in the Philippines wasn't focused on the Philippines. It was focused on China, so the Spanish had no incentive to encourage any kind of economic development there. If anything it would have made their conflict with the Moros on the southern islands more difficult. The world economy had changed enough by the time of the US colonization that you do get some forms of plantation development and a more serious interest in political administration of the Philippines, but whereas the Spanish mostly neglected the country, the US was highly extractive.

>Other examples of this approach are Ormuz, Goa, and Macao (Portugal) and Bombay and Calcutta (England).
>
>I think the Spanish approach was quite different from the start and that it is fair to say that trade was not their main priority even in the Philippines.

Trade absolutely was the priority in the Philippines. China was a strong enough and unified enough government to forbid the Spanish from entering and trading directly in China. Intramuros was specifically founded to be the location where Spanish and Chinese traders would meet to conduct trade for highly prized Chinese goods like silk. Manila was the terminus of the Spanish galleon trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon

The big thing that distinguishes Manila from the other examples you listed, except Macao which provided the Portuguese with the same thing the Spanish used Manila for and the British later used Hong Kong for, was that China was strong enough to keep foreign powers out and conduct trade on their terms. India wasn't. It didn't have a unified government or political system or even a national identity.

The European disease issue is tricky. B/c under all the colonial schemes disease was the main killer. Most of the killings in the Mexico conquest initially were native group on native group. It was people who hated the Mexica aligning with with Cortes or taking advantage of the chaos to rebel. But after that, disease went through and killed in large numbers, usually around 30% under all the colonies, and then mismanagement, refusal to grant medical help, reservations and encomienda, forced labor and migration, killed another 60% under all the colonial systems.

But Spain and Portugal had a different legal underpinning to their colonies. The Treaty of Tordesillas required them to Christianize the inhabits and made them subjects of their respective crowns. In the English colonies the inhabitants were foreign peoples. They weren't subjects of the British crown and their land had to be bought or claimed through a doctrine of discovery. This led the Spanish to try to integrate native peoples into the colonies through the encomienda system. Where as the English, and later American and Canadians, needed to push them off of land b/c they were foreign elements, and therefore dangerous.

That doesn't mean the Spanish weren't incredibly cruel. In letters from 1502 and 1503 the Spanish Crown limited enslaving and punishing the native inhabitants but made exceptions for mining, but also for people who wouldn't convert, especially if they practiced cannibalism, human sacrifice, or witchcraft. That became a handy accusation for conquistadors to enslave the indigenous population. But it was limited by the indigenous people's ability to seek atonement with the religious authorities. There was nothing similar in the English colonies. The abuses were somewhat mitigated in the Spanish Colonies in 1512 with the Laws of Burgos.

Both systems conducted a genocide. But the Spanish genocide focused more on cultural elements. By the 1800s, if you look at the battles against indigenous people in Yucatan by the Spanish and in California or Texas by Americans, you can see the difference. The Americans were fighting wars of extermination. The Spanish, and later Mexicans, were fighting for political and cultural control. That's why you have these indigenous communities that are large practiced their rites in secret in Mexico and lived with Spanish descendants in their communities and smaller groups who were isolated from the American/Canadian settlers on reservations, but groups who were able to retain more of their indigenous culture in the US and Canadian systems..

There's a good book on the two different legal theories underpinning colonialism by Robert Miller called Native America, Discovered and Conquered.

It's important to remember that at this time there wasn't really an idea of citizenship in Spain. It was just starting to really form in places like England and the Netherlands. The model of governance was arranged more around the crown and its subjects. And subjects had groups within them. Aristocrats, military officers, missionaries, people in certain towns, peasants, non-Christians, non-Catholics, all had different statuses rights and duties in the Spanish system. Rights, responsibilities, and privileges weren't uniform anywhere. You could be a resident of one town and have the same status and profession as a resident of the next town over and have completely different tax burdens and feudal duties b/c your city or your guild had negotiated something different than the next town or guild has. They were always negotiations between the crown and the subjects.

So it's very true to that the Philippines or Mexico were provinces, but they were also colonies b/c that was type of grant of authority the King and Queen had given to the administrators, and the people in those colonies had different duties and rights both within the colony (Native born Spaniards having the most) and between their colony and the metropole.

England's Royal Africa Company basically pushed the Spanish and Portuguese out of the slave trade. So, I'm not sure this holds up.

The other thing is as terrible as the Spanish genocide of the Americas was, it was a lot less successful than the British genocide of the Americas. Mexico and S. America still had large indigenous populations after the colonization. Spain then focused more on cultural genocide. Whereas the British wiped out and relocated the indigenous people in N. America as they advanced, and then the Americans did the same. Now people's like the Iroquois, Cherokee, and Anishinaabe, which heavily populated the Eastern portion of the country are just small communities, usually far from their original areas.

They focused on those b/c the only thing that China would trade for was precious metals. Spain's trade was focused on silks and spices b/c they were high value items. They needed the currency for that. Acapulco came to exists basically b/c it was the staging area for sending silver to Manila and receiving spices and silks that would then be taken by caravan to Veracruz and shipped back to Spain.

Edit: I linked to it in another answer, but the wikipedia article on the Manila galleon trade has a good explanation of what the Spanish Crown was using the precious metals for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon

Charles Mann's 1493 also goes into detail about this trade.

I've read a few books recently, and one of the things you see is that Spain did focus on trade, but mostly for the Crown and the Crown's favorites. You don't get a rise in banking. You don't get the creation of joint stock companies. You don't get an insurance industry. You don't get a growth of the merchant class. You do get a lot of smuggling.

Whereas, the British and Dutch especially, focused on a less top down form of trade. You get the development of risk reduction institutions like the joint stock company and companies like Lloyds of London that mitigate risk. You get institutions that facilitate the allocation of capital. You get exchanges that create visible price signals.

Spain conducted trade in a top down method that focused income back into the top. It was focused on using hard currency from the Americas to trade for high value items in Manila. It wasn't creative about it and it closed a lot of people off from the trade by keeping it a monopoly controlled by the crown. This didn't encourage risk taking or innovation. The Dutch and the English had freer trade systems, the value of the trade was more distributed which created more people able to participate. More people experimented and you get new institutions, you get new methods of efficiency, and so on.

There's also a lot of political institutional differences, especially from English parliament, that prevented some of the more wasteful military adventurism that Spain suffered from.

Frank Fukayama's The Origins of Political Order actually does a good job of highlighting some of the key differences, especially from the standpoint of administration. Spain just didn't invest in administering their territories and didn't develop them b/c there was little reason to. The wealth that could be potentially made would be concentrated into a few chosen subjects of the Crown, the Crown, and the Church. It didn't make sense to take big risks. Read it with 1493 by Charles Mann if you can.

I found The Civil War in 50 Objects at a thrift store for cheap and picked it up. It's from the New York Historical Society. It's got a good selection of artifacts. B/c so many people go through New York and b/c NYC has some unique historical events during the period it's an especially good collection to pull objects from. The book is actually printed on pretty high quality paper and the images of the objects are full color and well done. I think I paid $5 for it, which is a total steal. This is a book that'll probably last, with minimal image fading for at least a few decades.

One of the objects that are specific to New York City is a pamphlet with the mayor at that time, Fernando Wood who was famously corrupt even by NYC machine standards, calling for NYC to succeed from the Union and the State of New York, to become a free city. It was apparently a ploy to try and force Lincoln and Congress to grant NYC some kind of benefits in trade. Lincoln immediately shut it down and after Ft. Sumter it was quickly forgotten.

There's one called The Big Oyster about the development of New York and its relationship to oysters that came out a few years ago. It's by the same author as Salt and Cod.

The BBC had a podcast a few years ago called The History of the World in 100 Objects that they did with the British National Museum. They put out a book of it, which is nice b/c you can actually see the objects. The book is by Neil McGregor and I know he as some similar ones. I think there's one on Shakespeare's England in 50 objects.

That series spun off a whole bunch of other similar books. I'm reading one right now from the New York Historical Society about the history of the US Civil War in 50 objects, there's one on the history of the US in 100 documents, there's one on India.

Usually there's an explanation in the introduction or an author's note in the opening pages about what's changed.

William Dalrymple has a series of books and a podcast. The Anarchy has gotten solidly good reviews. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/11/anarchy-relentless-rise-east-india-company-william-darymple-review

His podcast is called Empire and he does it with Anita Anand who's written books on Sophia Duleep Singh and the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre. https://twitter.com/EmpirePodUK

Hitler was not actually that great of a planner or organizer. The current theory in historical circles about Hitler's management style is that he would kind of voice ideas he might want to get done and then underlings would compete to get them done to impress him. Whoever did it the best would gain his favor and maybe some promotions or a bigger area to manage. There's been some push back on this theory about whether or not Hitler was more intentional or involved in organization, but where that seems to happen were in things Hitler was really interested in like architecture or war planning.

With diplomacy Hitler was kind of distractible. If things were going well he would get more involved, often making grandiose plans. When they weren't he would look for something else to occupy him.

I've never hear of him making plans for reparations from Vichy France. Operation Barbarossa started a year after the Battle of France. He spent just enough time on France to get an occupation set up so he could plan an invasion of England and start planning the part of the war that was more important to him, clearing out the east for Lebensraum. The Battle of Britain didn't go the way he thought, the air war wasn't really as grandiose as he liked, and he kind of lost interest and turned to focus on Barbarossa.

If Barbarossa had turned out differently his attention might have returned to France and he might have been interested in getting reparations to rebuild after the war, but it's hard to say. He was kind of famous for having these monologues at his dinner guests and saying all sorts of grandiose things. He would bring up reparations, but it's all the steps after that we don't really seeing happen. No one was drafting up plans to enforce a reparations policy, or at least if they were they weren't getting invited to dinner with Hitler to take the next steps forward. And if you were ambitious you were probably focusing more on things that Hitler was interested in, like rounding up Jewish people or prosecuting the war, or increasing France's industrial contributions to the war machine.

Realistically, Vichy couldn't borrow money from anyone. And in German SOP they looted France's treasury when they took over. So the best way for France to be useful was to exploit France's industrial base and that's what Germany did. I think the Vichy economy operated at like 110% of it's prewar level in the first year and most of that was producing German war materiel. There's a decent paper on that aspect of the occupation here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30034464

This seems more like someone's specific theory of federalism more than anything widespread or accepted by a large number of constitutional scholars.

There's tons of overlap in state powers since basically the 1930s and the expansion of federal power. Some are simple like military responsibilities shared between the Executive and Congress for commanding and funding and provisioning armies, and state's militia powers. Other stuff is more complicated and has changed overtime, like the expansion of commerce clause power into what was traditionally seen as a state's responsibility for providing for the "common weal", which meant any kind of safety, or health regulation or policing powers. Some stuff has changed b/c of amendments. Citizenship in the U.S. as a whole was determined by states until the 14th Amendment, but it was a joint issue b/c the citizenship in the state would make you a citizen of the US and able (hypothetically) to use federal enforcement of the privileges and immunities clause.

There's a lot of overlapping areas too, like the power to tax. Basically you can scan through Art I. Sec 8 and count tons or areas where the powers are overlapping. States and the Feds can both borrow money (but this is complicated b/c of issues of state banks issuing paper money and issuing bonds), both can establish courts and their courts can hear both state and federal matters in some areas (concurrent jurisdiction). There's other stuff like voting that was mostly a state power but has become more federalized b/c states failed to really protect the right. Some stuff varies from state to state, like my state has protections for free speech that go beyond the 1st A. and other states have gone the other way and have tried to limit stuff like free exercise of religion or establish religion, which used to be a state right, so that would indicate an overlapping power if a state can expand on it.

I read a fair amount on the Constitution and an advanced degree on the topic and I can't remember hearing the 6 powers theory and thinking through the big popular books on the Const, like Akhil Amir Reed's books or Chemerinsky's, I can't remember it ever being mentioned, even as an argument they counter.

I could easily be wrong b/c there are literally 1000s of books on the topic and some that were popular 2 centuries ago are basically unread today, so it may have been an older idea.

I think some of that is from when the book came out and the idea of the internet was novel and still very conceptual. Since a lot of people who built the internet were fans of the book they kind of designed the internet based on their imaginings from the book, so it's no longer novel and conceptual. Readers have near constant experience with the net or and have seen it depicted in hundreds of pop entertainment. So it's not as hard to read as it was 40ish years ago when it came out b/c you get the idea of hacking through a network pretty intuitively, or at least have pop images ready to slot into your imagination when you come across it.

They don't cover the same era really. The Creation of the American Republic is pre Constitution and Empire of Liberty is post Constitution.

That's a big shift. The first book focuses on the problems of fighting the Revolutionary War and the development of a national government, and that failure. It deals with the rural uprisings, the depression, paper money issues, and ratification.

The second book deals with the development of the federal government and the associated institutions, the Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812.

Personally, I'd recommend Pauline Maier's books over Wood's, but that's my opinion.

This is political, so it has elements of arrogance and greed and cultural chauvinism, but there's also a lot of politics. Part of the reason to colonize N. America for the English was to get rid of troublesome groups within the country. England had a lot of religious groups that were a pain in the ass to governing powers. They could warehouse them in North America where they were kind of out of sight, out of mind.

Spain had all these people that were no longer needed to fight the Moors. Having a large warrior class with nothing to do is dangerous. Letting them conquer another territory was unifying and focused trouble away from home.

France had severe budgetary problems. Colonies might provide the king with financial relief, and leverage against his own nobles, if enough wealth could be extracted.

The 30 Years War/War of Spanish Succession had put the Netherlands in a precarious position. Without population, they'd have to rely on mercenaries. Colonies provided a potential source of revenue to pay those mercenaries without levying heavy taxes on the local populations.

Countries were jealous of the wealth their competitors were achieving and wanted to gain stature against their neighbors.

This stuff is all very multifaceted and some reasons can be stated more openly than other reasons. Saying you want to Christianize the New World is great PR for Spain. Saying you need to find something to do with all these blood thirsty ruffians from Extremadura so you're going to send them to the edge of the world on some harebrained scheme is not. So you say one real loud and whisper the other.

The racism is a little more complicated. There's good research and writing on how it developed out of the needs of imperialism and probably wasn't a cause of imperialism, but it's awful offspring, until maybe beginning in the 17th century.

>George Washington didn't want any standing fighting force after the Revolution and we can debate as to why, personally I think he saw a standing military as a threat that potentially could overthrow him.

This isn't remotely true. Washington's anger at militia forces is well documented. He hated their lack of discipline, saw them as little better than a mob, and was disgusted with their cowardice.

It's not hard to find sources for this.

George Washington was not a big writer, and still managed to turn out this long letter, probably one of his longest, just about problems with militia forces. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-06-02-0305