Current Reading August 2025

Starting off the month, finished up with Archaeological Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Douglas D. Scott and others.

I'm attaching the review of the other book I mentioned above, Archaeology, History, and Custer's Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined by Richard A. Fox

Finally finished Anna-Latifa Mourad's The Enigma of the Hyksos Volume II Transforming Egypt into the New Kingdom:

Wrapped up A Century of Tomorrows, which is quite the gallop through a variety of thinkers, but does cohere into a reasonable history of those who fancied themselves to be visionaries of the future.

Completed another very interesting book, Fuzzy-Wuzzy: The Campaigns in Eastern Sudan 1884-85 by Brian Robson

Finished New England Bound, which kind of ends on a whimper but which does a fine job of examining the circumstances by which the Puritan Fathers became complicit in the business of slavery, and which it appears that the early New England colonies would not have been viable without.

Finished The Black Battlefleet by G. A. Ballard.

>6 Shrike58: Does Warren discuss how Indentured Servitude folded into and became its own form of slavery?

What's up gang

What's going on in here.

>8 Blythewood: Actually, Warren mostly talks about how any likely version of indentureship was always more expensive than chattel slavery in the context of New England and the Barbados. This might be less relevant in New England, where African and "Indian" slaves were doing mostly the same work as everyone else, as opposed to the Sugar Islands were life had to be cheap because it was disposable.

Finished another great book, The True Blue: The Life and Adventures of Colonel Fred Burnaby 1842-85 by Michael Alexander

Wrapped up Pharaohs of the Sun; the author flirts with sliding into the weeds, but mostly stays on track in terms of showing how the Egyptian 18th Dynasty's strategy of power was eventually done in by its own internal contradictions. At some point I need to look at de la Bedoyere's works on Rome.

From the library: Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World by Danielle Phillips-Cunningham
Focuses on Burroughs's labor work for Black women and girls as well as her contributions to the labor movement.

Completed another very interesting book from an author I will be interested in following, Infantry in Battle 1733-1783 by Alexander S. Burns

Knocked off From Chicaza to Chickasaw, which while not bad, I also suspect is close to becoming a period piece; 15 years is a long time for an academic monograph to remain relevant. Not to mention that the Chickasaw Nation does not figure as much in this work as I had hoped.

Finished a very nice An Empire of Silver by Robert Leaman Brown

Finished Holding Back the River, an excellent accounting of how things can always be worse than you imagined. Reading this account of the slow-motion collapse of water-control in the Mississippi Basin, and what it would really take to get a handle on things, one ends with a profound sense of pessimism.

About thirty years ago, I read a popular book about floods (if not actually published by Time Life it was certainly in their style) which left me with, among other things, the impression that the water-control works of the lower Mississippi were a disaster waiting to happen. Sounds like Kelley is very much of the same opinion.

Finishing up Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. It focuses on Tsar Nichlas II and his wife, Alexandra. I really enjoyed the book and found it very readable. Massie does an excellent job of humanizing the two central people, as well as highlighting all the points that helped contribute to their downfall during the Russian Revolution.

>20 Rome753: I read a mass paperback edition of this book issued in 1985. Also the 1995 follow up book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter

>21 princessgarnet: Very cool. How was the follow up book?

Finished an interesting but very technical Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery From Space by Roger D. Launius and Dennis R. Jenkins

>20 Rome753: It picks up after Nicholas and Alexandra ends and covers the years with Anna Anderson and other imposters. I thought it was interesting. The extended branch of the Romanovs is still around though.

>24 princessgarnet: Sounds very interesting.