Happy Wednesday everyone!

Just wrapped up [Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588](http://Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588 https://a.co/d/ecEjjHN) by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker. It provides an excellent scholarly account of the Spanish Armada's defeat in 1588. Adding to how detailed the accoint is, I especially appreciated their analysis of how the fleet came to be and why it ultimately failed (based on evidence from eyewitnesses, historical documents, and artefacts from shipwreck sites.) Highly recommend!

I took a stab at Douglas Brinkley's Silent Spring Revolution. It's not really a topic I'm interested in. I'm not anti environmentalist or anything silly, it's just a big topic and I always felt like I could either learn a lot about 2 or 3 other topics or spend as much time and learn a little bit about environmentalism. So, this wasn't exactly the most interesting thing to me. I had to read it for a book club. I only made it about 2/3s of the way through, but it's about 700 pages before you get to the notes.

So, for something I don't really love, it drew me in for a good 400 pages. If the history of environmentalism is important to you this is a good book. Brinkley is a great writer, I loved his book on Katrina. I can't say I really learned a lot though, maybe b/c the history is so recent. It was within the common memory while I was growing up that lakes and rivers were full of pollution and human shit and would catch fire and cause outbreaks and that the air was awful. I remember whole months where it was so bad that visibility was measured less than a football field.

So I think maybe people born in the 80s or later would get more out of it. If you are interested in the history of the environmental movement in the US after WWII then I would definitely recommend this.

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Managed to get through 2 books (reviews copied and pasted) -

The Radium Girls:The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

>4.5/5 rounding down for Goodreads.

>Very good about women in the 1920s who got sick from painting glow in the dark watches with radium based paint. Covers their illness, the coverup by the companies involved, and the fight to get compensation. Lots of in-depth medical detail on the damage done to the women’s bodies. Overall very good.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson

>3.75/5. Not a must-read but decent if you want an accessible book about Americans in Nazi Germany.

>The book is mainly about the American ambassador William Dodd and his daughter Martha in 1933-34 Berlin. The main topics it covers are attempts to stop attacks on Americans by the SA, Dodd’s attempts to warn the USA about the danger of the Nazis while also fighting the rich pro-German clique in the state department, and the growing terror of the Nazis. Dodd’s daughter Martha starts off quite pro-Nazi but becomes very opposed over the course of the book due to witnessing the violence and oppression. The main bit of the book, 1933-1934, ends with the Night of the Long Knives and it’s aftermath (this part being the best of the book) but has about 50 pages after that for the rest of the 30s and what happened next to the main people involved. The book is good for the lives of the well-off in this period as well as the interactions between the ambassador and the various Nazis.

>The book is well written and because it is focused one on family you don’t really need to know much about the time period to read it.

I'm now about halfway through Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild which has been fantastic so far, no complaints (his books Kings Leopold's Ghost about the Congo Free State and To End All Wars about WWI British concientious objectors are also great and worth reading)

hello, i’m looking for book recommendations about post-roman britain, up to the early middle ages/unification of england. i’m interested the history of the britons, picts, etc as well as the heptarchy and the angles. i know that that’s a lot of history to cover so i’m not strictly looking for a book that covers everything, but if you know of any books that cover some or all of the above topics i’d really appreciate your recs! tia!

Might try Simon Schama's History of Britain vol. 1

I've just finished **The Cheese and the Worms ** by Carlo Ginzburg. It's been on my reading list for a long while. However, it didn't quite engage my attention. The approach , which I understand was radical at the time, was to focus on the details of a specific individual of 'lower' status rather than the grand narratives of Kings. In this case, a miller in Italy with some rather heterodox views on Christianity, and who is brought to trial for this worldview. This microhistory was perhaps novel at the time, though much more common since.

Unfortunately, the book (more of an extended monograph, really) gets caught up in some particularly niche points of theology. There's not a lot about the miller himself, perhaps due to the lack of documentary evidence outside the trial.

Overall, not as exciting as I was hoping.

This is a great subsection to add. I recently purchased Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, which i expect to be a great read. It has a 5 star rating on amazon which seems good

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Another interesting thing i've read recently was a blog on the historical side of why we create new year's resolutions What is the Origin of the New Year's Resolution? I thought it was really cool, it apparently goes back to rome.

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hope yall enjoy!

Empire of the Summer Moon was a fantastic read. As someone who was born and raised in Texas it was amazing to me how relatively recent all of that was as well.

Thanks for the New Year resolution info, really interesting. I knew that the calendar (January 1) starts the day the new Roman Consoles were sworn in, but had no idea about New Year resolutions.

I really enjoyed In the Garden of Beasts! It’s a very interesting slice of life

LOOKING FOR SOURCE

I’m currently writing a research thesis regarding George Pattons rerouting of the Seventh Army in Sicily in 1943. His chief of staff at the time was Hobart Gay and I’m told he had a diary during this time. I think his diary will hold some valuable information but I can’t find evidence it exists anywhere but I’ve heard it exists multiple times. I’m told that this is its title “With Patton's Army: The Diary of Colonel Hobart D. Gay, 1943-1945.” If anyone could point me in the right direction or even find it that would be so helpful to me. Thank you

How about a crowdsource list of best History books? Or a reading guide for different subject areas. They have things like this for r/comicbooks for example and it is really useful (and also somewhere helpful to direct people if mods want to remove low effort posts)

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/wiki/recommendedlist

Thanks. I looked under the About bit but couldn't see it!

You may be interested in "the Anglo-Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England 400-1066" by Marc Morris