Interest in History

I'm interested to know what kinds of history interests are represented here.

I'm working on a PhD in history and I'm focused on the nineteenth century.

(1) Greek and Roman ancient history.
(2) 19th century French Catholicism.
(3) British Raj.

Specifically:
Early Medieval Britain
Tudor England
Early Native American migration
WWII

In general:
Historical Linguistics
Food Anthropology

I'm in international relations, not history, so I work a lot on current military security and political issues. Primarily French, British and EU military relations with Africa as well as modern counterinsurgency warfare.

My history interests are specifically:

19th and 20th century developments in military strategic thinking, the revolution in military affairs, especially in small wars
Napoleon
Franco-Prussian War
The World Wars
French and British Colonialism in Africa

And above all else:

Algerian War 1954-1962

MysteryWatcher: What specific facet of the 19th century do you work on? What region, what subject?

I'm not an academic historian, but my undergraduate history degree focused on Middle Eastern History; I've also got an interest in intellectual history, and my history reading has had a particular focus on South Asia recently.

Snoopy 205, it's been a long time, but I once spent a lot of time focused on the Algerian War - I'd love to hear more about some of the more recent writing on it.

Hi A musing,

To answer your question about Algeria, not much has come out in recent years. Alistair Horne released an updated edition of A Savage War of Peace. Martin Alexander has two good books out about strategy and French soldiers in the Algerian War. David Galula's and Roger Trinquier's books have also been re-released in the last few years.

To study it, you really have to go to the primary sources, Charles de Gaulle's writings, the accounts of French generals on the ground, including Paul Ely, Raoul Salan, Edmond Jouhaud, Jacques Massu. Pierre Pellissier has a good journalistic account of the Algerian War, written in 1999, I think. All of these are in French. The best overall account aside from Horne is journalist Yves Courriere's four volume history, starting with Les fils de Toussaint. Again, only in French. Charles-Robert Ageron has written some, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Hope that helps. What have you run across in the past in the way of books on the war?

I forgot Guy Perville's Atlas de la Guerre d'Algerie. It's an OK source, but I have noticed some of the operations for Plan Challe in 1959 are mislabeled and located wrong on the map (I've done recent archival research on Plan Challe, and thus saw the mistakes.

Snoopy - love the name.
To be absolutely specific (which often leads to a long-winded dissertation that no-one - least of all me - wants to listen to):

I'm currently looking at the way that genteel women in the nineteenth century actively performed illness in public and private spheres to maintain and contribute to their status and lifestyle. I'm specifically interested in how such mannerisms were transferred from Britain and whether they were enacted in the same way in the colonies of Australia.

I've studied a wide range of history as an undergraduate, (ancient, modern, art, archaeology)including some military history. I've always had an interest in ancient weapons. Are you at uni?

Greek/Roman. (M.A. in ancient history & culture + M.A. in archaeology; I should be considered a general anaesthetic.)

Renaissance.

Colonialism in Latin America.

Topics: otherness, international relations, gender perspectives, history of warfare.

Guilty pleasure: trade (ancient world - ca 1800). No fancy economics, no academic depth; I just like to read about spices and things.

Hi MysteryWatcher, your topic sounds interesting. I'm always interested in what aspects of European societies and governments transferred successfully or unsuccessfully into the colonies.

I'm in the later stages of a PhD in international relations, writing on French military operations in Africa after Algeria and decolonization.

Oh my, a PhD with practical application. Now why didn't I think of that?

MysteryWatcher - your topic sounds fascinating

My thing is women's history, mainly 17th - 20th century.

My MA dissertation is looking at British newspapers created a moral panic about women, drugs and nightclubs in 1922. I'm generally interested in how society has reacted to 'deviant' women, particularly female criminals.

I'm also completely fascinated by women's involvement in Chartism and want to look at this next.

Guilty pleasure.....transport history

charbutton: I would really love to read that!

desideo: I would really love to actually finish writing it!

It's a fascinating subject, but it's been a long and painful process.

Charbutton: I agree with Desideo - that sounds like a really cool topic. Don't you just love the word "deviant"? In my thesis I'm looking at whether the performance of illness was considered deviant or whether it conformed to wider social norms.

Are you using a social control theory? Oh, and why 1922 in particular?

I've been analysing the newspaper articles using moral panic frameworks, but social control is definitely an angle to look at. Any suggestions?

A young woman called Freda Kempton died in March 1922 of a cocaine overdose. She was a dancing instructuress, meaning she was paid to entertain male guests at seedy Soho nightclubs, so definitely deviated from the behaviour expected of nice middle class girls. While not the first woman to die of an overdose and certainly not the most famous, her death seems to touch on wider fears about young woman and the moral decay of British society after WWI. Also, she was closely linked to Brilliant Chang, a key figure linked to the Chinese criminal world, so journalists could also indulge their fears about foreign men preying on young white women.

The scary thing is that reading 1922 reports in papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express is much like reading these papers today!

If you're interested in this subject, Marek Kohn has written a book called Dope Girls that gives a good overview of the period.

Ummm, let me think. I used SCT in my honours thesis when I was looking at police/private detectives, so my knowledge is fairly narrow, but here's some to kick off with. (You're probably already aware of them anyway). The grandaddy of them all is obviously Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish is good for general concepts of social control, panopticonism and the internalisation of societal expectations into the individual. The History of Sexuality looks at the way society articulated a complex division between what was considered acceptable and what was deviant. I also like Stanley Cohen's Visions of Social Control. If you're interested you might like to enter social control and deviance into a title search here at LT.

Still, I kind of like the idea of a moral panic framework - I'd like to read some ideas on that myself. Any suggestions?

Doing honours in Ancient History- thesis on the confrontation between Antiochos III and Rome c 190BC, but i have alos done a BA in modern Brisitsh and American Hisotry and did honours on Lebanon, Israel and America 1975-1983