Did you read Erik Larson's Thunderstruck? It's just after the Victorian era but he combines a murder case with the development of the radio. It was really interesting. You learn about both the culture of the era and the technology of radio and pharmacies at the same time.

This week I read Matthew Restall's Seven Myths About The Spanish Conquest. It was a good book, short and to the point. It addressed the big ever present myths about the conquest. In the Anglophonic world most of them rest on Prescott's old work. Apparently Dan Carlin hinted recently that he would be doing an episode about the conquest. This is probably a good book to read before that b/c I'm certain Carlin with use about 6 or the 7 myths that are addressed in the book.

I finally was able to get back to Jon Meacham's new Lincoln biography, And There Was Light. It's a little late, but this is a good "dad" book if you're looking for a gift. I've probably read about 10ish Lincoln biographies and a decent chunk of other period relevant books and papers. This probably isn't my favorite biography ever but it's good and it does a couple things that I think are important that other biographies didn't address or at least didn't do so as clearly.

Because of the whole "Actually, Lincoln was a racist" stuff that goes around, this book did a lot to contextualize it. It tries to put statements that are usually pulled out of any context to paint Lincoln one way or another, into context. Lincoln isn't absolved from racist sentiment or feelings, but is contextualized to show that he was progressive on the issue in a way that was practical. So you get these quotes about colonization or his statements to Horace Greely about freeing only as many slaves as needed, within the context of recent votes or elections or anticipation of the Emancipation Proclamation. It's all important context. It makes it clear that Lincoln wasn't the kind of autocrat who could dictate policy and have it followed. Lincoln was a politic player and bound by public opinion. He said some terrible stuff, but also did so to manage that opinion to reach highly commendable goals.

He also addressed the election of 1864 and its importance. It's hard not to read that section of the book as a rebuke on the modern GOP. But Lincoln made it clear that there would be elections, they would be on time, and he would step aside for McClellan (Who probably had a lock on the election up until Sherman took Atlanta). He also talked about the strides Lincoln took to make sure soldiers in the field could vote. Democratic states took pains to prevent troops in the field from voting and Lincoln used his powers to grant them furloughs and arrange transportation. It was to his advantage, but there's also an anecdote that Lincoln made sure a democrat that was being blocked was allowed on his train. And you can poo poo anecdotes like that, but you also have to remember how Lincoln used these things to his advantage with the press and I think it could just as easily be seen as a way for Lincoln to press his point about the importance of participatory democracy.

Overall I think it was a great biography and probably a good one if you're looking for a first biography of the man.

Edit: I'll add that this is also a really good example of how a work of history can indirectly address current issues without being didactic.

Catalhoyuk raises some interesting questions about that b/c it's a town entirely without roads. All the houses were built abutting each other and people walked across roofs and entered and exited through the roof. And it's one one of the oldest known towns.

Uboats stayed away from coasts b/c they were vulnerable to submarine spotter planes. The US and Britain used PBY-5s. There's other things like submarine nets, placing boats around each other to shield a boat. The other thing was German intelligence just wasn't very good compared to the allies. There's no German equivalent to cracking the Enigma machine.

Soviets did bomb and a lot of their pilot groups are very famous. There's lots of stories and media about the Night Witches. The Long Range Air Force (ADD) started bombing German cities in '42. Their tempo increased as the Soviet's progressed. I think it's mostly that media rarely focuses on Soviet air power. People seem to be more interested in their tanks.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I listened to a podcast with Shawcross not long ago but when I looked at my normal podcasts for history books it wasn't one of those. I'll try to remember who did it b/c it was interesting.

It was on History Extra: https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/mexico-ill-fated-austrian-emperor-podcast-edward-shawcross/

The Katja Hoyer book Blood and Iron has been popular for 19th century Germany. You can hear an interview with her over on the New Books Network. https://newbooksnetwork.com/blood-and-iron

Richard Evans also has a list over on 5 books for 19th century Germany. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/nineteenth-century-germany-richard-evans/

There were a few varieties. The Ketchum grenade was thrown or lobbed and had a fuse on the tip. There were also Rains grenades, basically the Confederates took the idea of the contact fuse on a Ketchum grenade and buried it nose end up in what amounts to the first landmines. The Union hated these and there's stories of them marching POWs at the head of their columns.

https://armyhistory.org/mine-warfare-in-the-civil-war/

One thing they used was the iconic cowboy hat. It has two features that help with cooling. The first is the broad brim to provide shading. Cowboys basically grew out of the Mexican adoption of Spanish cattle raising culture. When Americans start flowing into west Texas at the end of the 19th century, they learned from the people that were already there. The brim on a cowboy hat isn't as broad as a sombrero, but it's the same idea, to shade the wearer.

Many hats have a lower crown to trap heat by the wearer's head to keep them warmer. The cowboy hat has a higher crown. This let heat released from the wearer's head escape or at least not be trapped right by the head. 10 Gallon cowboy hats are the most extreme for the cowboy hat style. You also see something similar with the famous cigarillo hats that the caballeros wore (Emiliano Zapata favored this kind of sombrero and now it's often called a Sombrero de Zapata https://www.mexicoescultura.com/galerias/actividades/principal/image79_2.jpg).

Anyway, in 1865 John B. Stetson recognized these needs, saw what the Mexicans were doing and invented his version, The Boss of the Plains hat. B/c it met the needs of cowboys so well they adopted the hat and it became iconic. It had other features that were useful to cowboys, but the brim and the crown were the important things for heat.

The Cowboy Museum has a little video that talks a little about it. https://youtu.be/HNqAzyBfXe0

So, this probably is related to the fact that the Soviets used a different gauge of railroad tracks than the rest of Europe. The Soviet tracks were about 5 feet wide, while the standard European gauge was 4'8.5". The Soviets desperately needed coal to power their trains, factories, and for heat. So it would make sense for them to lay Soviet gauge track to the mines instead of transferring loads from one train to another at the border.

The wikipedia page on 5' gauge has some info and if you look around you can find lots of websites talking about the issues with the gauge change and how it hindered the Nazi supply when they invaded. The Wehrmacht has this popular conception that it was highly mechanized but it turns out not to be true. They were heavily reliant on horses and rails. So, when they lost the rail link they began suffering significant supply issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railways

BBC 4's podcast In Our Time just had an episode on the Irish rebellion of 1789 to give you some idea of what could have happened if Napoleon had focused on the UK instead of Egypt. It's a great podcast worth subscribing too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fwb9

You might dig Fox Margalit's book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth about deciphering Linear B. It was pretty interesting to see how you would go about something like that before computers.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16240783-the-riddle-of-the-labyrinth

I'm reading Half American by Matthew Delmont about Black servicemembers in WWII. The sheer waste of man power and talent is maddening and the coddling of white supremacists is enraging. He doesn't get into draft numbers, but I'd like to see a comparison. In the south during WWI, Black Americans were disproportionately drafted. I'm wondering if the discrepancy went away for WWII b/c it was more popular.

Also, I mentioned this in another thread, but I wish I could write movie scripts. Some of these guys served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion before hand. There's a woman, Salaria Kea, who volunteered as a nurse in Spain and in WWII and could only get work outside of the war in the US in TB wards at hospitals b/c of prejudice. She apparently went on to do a bunch of work in the civil rights movement. Someone else brought up Edward Carter who was an officer in Spain and then had to deal with the US army's prejudice during WWII.

It's insane that we have movies about people like Desmond Doss that had to be totally hyperbolized when we have these other stories that probably have to be down played to be believable.

Also, the section on the Port Chicago disaster made me so mad. White officers basically wasted 300 soldiers lives for petty bets and the navy blamed the enlisted men. It was just a galling dereliction of leadership and duty.

I'd definitely recommend the book.

You might dig the Ross King book, Booksellers of Florence. You can hear him talk about it at the Philadelphia Free Library. https://libwww.freelibrary.org/podcast/episode/2003

and Catallus has poems about it.

Not a housekeeper. They were excluded from FLSA, along with agricultural workers. Housekeepers got FLSA protections in 1974. I'm not sure agricultural workers have them yet. I think most ag worker protections are under state law.

Besides the Paxton book the other poster mentioned, I'd check out Ruth Ben-Ghiat's book, Fascist Modernities.

I've never heard that phrase. They're some superficial similarities, but they were very different individuals, in very different contexts, doing very different things. Can you point us to where you heard the term?

A lot of the terms in your question are very general and it's not clear what you mean. Sin is pretty clear, but what do you mean by better? You need to put what kind of metric you're using to mean better. If you're just looking at straight up numbers, sure, lots of other leaders have caused the deaths of more people.

But that's not the only thing that's measured when people claim that Hitler was uniquely awful. People look at how much destruction he caused, the time frame in which he did it, Stalin for instance was in power almost 3 times longer than Hitler yet didn't create a European wide catastrophe on par with WWII. Mao was in power for even longer, if you include his leadership of the CCP during the revolution.

You can also look at who the various other contenders killed, and except for Hitler, it was mostly their political enemies, or people who were thought to be enemies. Hitler killed a lot of people just b/c they were there. There's no Maoist or Stalinest equivalent of murdering the majority of the Slavic people for lebensraum. Neither Stalin nor Mao had any philosophy that required the total eradication of groups like Jews and Roma. Stalin and Mao generally killed people b/c of what they did or might do, not b/c of who they were.

You can also look at where they killed. Most of the other contenders were killing people within their own political entities. Hitler rampaged across all of Europe and North Africa, far outside the borders of Germany and Austria.

There's also the impact on what Hitler did to his own countryman. It wasn't just the military that was out killing people. He involved the whole society in the process, from the railroad workers shipping people to camps, to people who were given stolen property of Jewish people, to every business (which was almost every manufacturing concern of any size) that used slave labor. Under Nazism, it wasn't just the military, secret police, and political operatives. It was everyone.

My understanding is it mostly came down to resources. Everyone leading up to the war was pretty much on the same page as far as theory went. There were a few paths that were the most likely to be successful. But the Germans estimated the cost and the timeline to develop them and thought it wasn't feasible for them, and that they should put there limited resources into other things.

The US was able to work on all the paths and quickly found out that one of the paths was much more viable then the others and then focused on it. When they released information a few days after the Hiroshima bomb to prove that it was an atomic bomb that they dropped on Japan, the release had enough information that Heisenberg and the others then understood the steps to get there.

The BBC has a podcast on the topic. The last episode focuses on the events your question is about. It's not my favorite podcast, but it's not a huge time suck and there is lots of good info in it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08llv8n/episodes/downloads

Besides the main reasons /u/bradnelson mentioned, sometimes they would be used to tie down an army. The Battle of Gettysburg is a good example of this. Lee was trying to avoid an engagement while his forces were concentrated and Meade was reluctant to do anything b/c he was worried about the political ramifications on his job for any action. Meade's vanguard was lead by John Buford and he knew Lee had to go through Gettysburg. So he got there and started setting up defensive lines. His Confederate counterpart, Pettigrew spotted him while scouting and went and reported back to his CO, A. P. Hill. Gen Hill didn't believe him and set out a larger scouting force. This gave Buford an opportunity. He had just a small force, they weren't really supposed to engage, the main force of the Potomac was still a day or so away. But Buford used the time between running into Pettigrew and the second scouting force to set up defensive works and pick the best positioning. When that scouting force pulled up, they saw the force wasn't large and the two sides engaged each other. Buford did well enough that Hill diverted more forces from the withdrawal to Gettysburg, and as they showed up the beginning of the AoP start to show up. The whole thing snowballed from there.

Buford, was able to force Meade to commit, by drawing Hill, and then the rest of the AoV into the fight.

/u/wetworth on the /r/civilwar made this for me, the other day to give you an idea about Meade's whole vibe during the battle. https://imgur.com/a/yuskW8r

Peter Wilson, who wrote Europe's Tragedy, has a book on the HRE that came out about 5 years ago. I think it's just called The Holy Roman Empire. He's very well respected on the topic.

Pretty much every historian who comments on Howard Zinn start by explaining that all history has an agenda, it's about interpretation of messy and patchy records of human thoughts and actions. Howard Zinn is very up front about his. He literally writes what the agenda is on the first two pages of his introduction.
Historians will point out disagreements they have with his interpretations and work, but will also say it's a very important perspective to have and it has largely been ignored or siloed off in academic specialties of labor history, indigenous history, or ethnic studies.

Most of the people I see bag on Zinn are newspaper pundits and not historians.

That said, A People's History of the US isn't an academic book, so historians don't spend a lot of time with it b/c it's not relevant to their work.

I think it has a big impact. Institutions are more important for good governance than they usually get credit for. These colonies set up extractive institutions, not institutions for widespread improvement. If you read about the Spanish bank when it was developed, it was basically entirely set up to hold money and then transfer it back to the crown, or to lend it to the crown. It wasn't set up to distribute capital and create liquidity to help the economy improve, especially in the colonies. There's been some good comparisons between Dutch, English, and Spanish banking and the impact on colonial development. You can find lots of papers like this: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/231550/1/49-2020-1-111-140.pdf

There was also the Banco de Isabel in the 1850s. But development economics has studied the issue quite a bit and it's worth spending a little time reading.