Current Reading in January 2021

With the new year, new books to read, or listen to. I'm listening to Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones. This is a more scholarly work that looks at the holding of and policies towards prisoners held by both sides. It is a well researched work that explores how the treatment of prisoners changed constantly due to political and logistical pressures. Very interesting.

And I'm reading The Star Captains: Frigate Command in the Napoleonic Wars by Tom Wareham. I picked this up assuming it would be a collection of anecdotal tales of frigate captains, but pleasantly it turned out to be quite different. This is the expansion of the author's doctoral thesis examining all aspects of those who served as frigate captains, starting with backgrounds, promotions, pay, service locations and duration, details of command plus a lot more. It is a very interesting book if you are looking for a more scholarly look at these individuals.

>1 jztemple: The Wareham book sounds right up my alley.

This has been more of general history month so far but I did knock off Cold War Interceptor the other day. This is an examination of the projects that would have been the RAF's equivalents of the MiG-25; assuming that Britain could have afforded them!

>3 Shrike58: I've always had an interest in this subject since I picked up Project Cancelled: British Aircraft That Never Flew by Derek Wood years ago... good gosh, over forty years ago?

>4 jztemple: Tony Buttler and Chris Gibson have produced a whole raft of well-researched books on the topic. The main thing that distinguish them from Derek Wood is that they recognize that the great reshuffling of priorities in the late '50s that Wood bemoans was an imperative, and the small matter that the RAF was often their own worst enemy in terms of coming up with requirements that far out-stripped what British industry could produce. Case in the point, it wasn't just the politicians that gave up on the BAC TSR.2, the military also recognized that they had created a lemon, not a world beater.

Finished up Panzerartillerie, another slab of German organizational history from Thomas Anderson.

Just before the end of January I finished The Union Reader, edited by Richard B. Harwell. This is a very interesting anthology for those who care about American Civil War history. It’s a collection of letters, newspaper columns and journal entries from people of all sorts who took part in the war or witnessed it the war from the Union side. (Harwell also published a companion collection, The Confederate Reader.)

We get journal entries from Union soldiers in far flung theaters of war like New Mexico, but we are also taken inside Fort Sumter at the very beginning of the war, a diary entry of a woman watching the soldiers of both sides rush back and forth through the streets of her hometown, Gettysburg, first-hand accounts of major engagements like the Battle of Shiloh, letters and telegrams back and forth from an increasingly exasperated Lincoln to his generals during the early years of the conflict. There are accounts of life inside prisoner of war camps and a description of life in New Orleans during the Federal occupation.

Editor Richard B. Harwell (1915-1988) was a prominent enough Civil War historian (especially regarding the Confederacy) that the Atlanta Civil War Round Table now confers the Harwell Book Award for the best book on a Civil War subject published in the preceding year: http://www.civilwarroundtableofatlanta.org/Harwell-Bio.htm