Historical Book Recomendation Thread

[Flying Pig]

The big problem is that the Phoenicians' own records were largely wiped out by, well, the actual mechanism of deletio

 

[cybrxkhan]

Anybody know any good texts on the Khitan, particularly the Kara-Khitan/Western Liao? Granted, there's not a lot on the subject, and the only good, relatively contemporary book is Michal Biran's The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World, but I was wondering if there were any others. Or maybe at least a scholarly article or something.

 

[Phrossack]

Anybody know any good texts on the Khitan, particularly the Kara-Khitan/Western Liao? Granted, there's not a lot on the subject, and the only good, relatively contemporary book is Michal Biran's The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World, but I was wondering if there were any others. Or maybe at least a scholarly article or something.

Dunno about the Kara Khitai, but I've an intro to Chinese history that delves into the Liao Dynasty a little. Might have some citations of useful books. I'll have to give it a look sometime.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Dunno about the Kara Khitai, but I've an intro to Chinese history that delves into the Liao Dynasty a little. Might have some citations of useful books. I'll have to give it a look sometime.

Thanks, would be nice if there's some good stuff out there.

 

[Phrossack]

Thanks, would be nice if there's some good stuff out there.

It's pretty poorly sourced. There are citations in the back of the book, but no footnotes, numbers, or in-text citations. Most of that chapter's sources focus on the Jin Dynasty Jurchens.

The only relevant citations I found are these:

Spoiler :

Karl A. Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society Liao 907-1125. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 36 (Philadelphia, 1946). 254, n.27.

Ruth Dunnell, "The Hsi Hsia," in Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (New York, 1994), 1987.

Not much, though there must be more out there.

Shame that a ton of interesting parts of Asian history are black holes, though. The Tibetan Empire, the Emishi, the Ainu, Gökturks, Xiongnu... Seriously, is anything known about the Emishi? The shogun's full, original title was something like "Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo" because of that position's original role in fighting the Emishi, and the Emishi held off the Japanese for a while and may even have helped inspire the samurai to become horse archers, yet the Emishi themselves are almost totally unknown and ignored.

 

[cybrxkhan]

It's pretty poorly sourced. There are citations in the back of the book, but no footnotes, numbers, or in-text citations. Most of that chapter's sources focus on the Jin Dynasty Jurchens.

The only relevant citations I found are these:

Spoiler :

Karl A. Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society Liao 907-1125. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 36 (Philadelphia, 1946). 254, n.27.

Ruth Dunnell, "The Hsi Hsia," in Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (New York, 1994), 1987.

Not much, though there must be more out there.

Hmm. Thanks for that, I'll look into it. I did come across an abstract for one thesis on the Khitan/Liao where it basically said "so academics haven't really given a crap about the Khitan, sad face" so I suppose better something than nothing.

Shame that a ton of interesting parts of Asian history are black holes, though. The Tibetan Empire, the Emishi, the Ainu, Gökturks, Xiongnu... Seriously, is anything known about the Emishi? The shogun's full, original title was something like "Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo" because of that position's original role in fighting the Emishi, and the Emishi held off the Japanese for a while and may even have helped inspire the samurai to become horse archers, yet the Emishi themselves are almost totally unknown and ignored.

Yeah, lots of black holes in Asian history. In a lot of history, really. My professor who specializes in Iranian history said there's basically a crapload of untranslated documents lying around in a few places of the world, enough for thousands of graduate students to write dissertations and theses and whatever on.

I would think people would find the Khitan more interesting, especially their exodus adventure of sorts to Central Asia where they set up a Buddhist Chinese-style Empire and conned the Muslims into thinking they were actually the Chinese Empire, but guess not.

 

[sophie]

If there's any way to get a hold of that Cambridge book, I'm sure the citations therein would be much more helpful; looked like they had a chapter devoted to border states, which I'm sure the Liao would fall under, and Cambridge Uni Press books tend to be well sourced, and with a nice "Further Reading" section as well.

 

[cybrxkhan]

If there's any way to get a hold of that Cambridge book, I'm sure the citations therein would be much more helpful; looked like they had a chapter devoted to border states, which I'm sure the Liao would fall under, and Cambridge Uni Press books tend to be well sourced, and with a nice "Further Reading" section as well.

True, that's a good point.

I've looked it up on my university's library catalogue and indeed that Cambridge book seems to be an entire volumne dedicated to nothing but the border states, including the Liao/Khitan. Plus it seems like no one is borrowing it so that's good. Granted, it probably won't have much on the Kara-Khitan compared to the original Liao, but I guess it's better than nothing.

 

[Mouthwash]

It's pretty poorly sourced. There are citations in the back of the book, but no footnotes, numbers, or in-text citations. Most of that chapter's sources focus on the Jin Dynasty Jurchens.

The only relevant citations I found are these:

Spoiler :

Karl A. Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society Liao 907-1125. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 36 (Philadelphia, 1946). 254, n.27.

Ruth Dunnell, "The Hsi Hsia," in Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (New York, 1994), 1987.

Not much, though there must be more out there.

Shame that a ton of interesting parts of Asian history are black holes, though. The Tibetan Empire, the Emishi, the Ainu, Gökturks, Xiongnu... Seriously, is anything known about the Emishi? The shogun's full, original title was something like "Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo" because of that position's original role in fighting the Emishi, and the Emishi held off the Japanese for a while and may even have helped inspire the samurai to become horse archers, yet the Emishi themselves are almost totally unknown and ignored.

I like Central Asia... it feels incredibly neglected by the Western world.

 

[Phrossack]

I like Central Asia... it feels incredibly neglected by the Western world.

It's neglected by pretty much everyone except the Russians, unfortunately.

 

[Dachs]

It's neglected by pretty much everyone except the Russians, unfortunately.

I wouldn't say so. There are bits and pieces of very good scholarship on Central Asia from just about everywhere. The real problem is the extreme paucity of source material.

 

[Antilogic]

Sub-Saharan Africa called, it wants its shtick back.

 

[Dachs]

a lot of people don't think that that's "history" at all, but prehistory/anthropology

 

[Pangur Bán]

That's 'history''s problem. 'History' should be anthropology (and good 'history' is).

 

[cybrxkhan]

I've always thought of as history and anthropology as two sides of the same coin. I've heard people call history the most social sciency of the humanities and anthropology the most humanistic of the social sciences and I know at some schools history is sometimes in the social science department and anthropology in the humanities.

But hey. Maybe that's just personal bias as they're my two favorite fields of study.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Well, what is history? It's the study of the past in theory, but that's really meaningless in itself. To your enthusiastic amateur history is no more than deciding whether or not someone was a goodie or a badie, or about whether you could do better than some past general or king. Proper history is really the study of all the past cultures and institutions and the events that took place around them. An individual historian however specializes in a particular past culture or cultures. So basically he is an anthropologist, and if he's not he's unlikely to be any good. The only difference between the two is the sort of sources they are meant to specialize in ... anthropologists are supposed to do living cultures, but in practice they also do dead ones; and indeed much of your undergrad's experience of anthropology is the Trobriand Islanders in the early twentieth century or the Yanomamo in the 1970s and similar topics relating what are now past cultures known only through second-hand accounts.

 

[Louis XXIV]

To me, anthropology, archaeology, and history all try to answer the same questions from differing perspectives or methodologies. A good historian needs to take into account the work done in the other two. However, certainly with archaeology, it's sometimes best to not take into account historical sources (or to perhaps downplay them) since it can lead to loss of objectivity.

 

[Dachs]

That's 'history''s problem. 'History' should be anthropology (and good 'history' is).

i have a hard time believing that good anything "should be" anthropology

 

[Traitorfish]

Rankeans gonna Ranke.

 

[Dachs]

Rankeans gonna Ranke.

clearly you missed my argument in the rants thread about the linguistic turn, then