Recently Read Recommendation

I read Adam Zamoyski's Moscow 1812:Napoleon's Fatal March, and highly recommend it for everyone.

Just finished rereading Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 and posted a review of it. Published in 1991, it was a pathbreaking work in the way Indians and whites interacted ("the middle ground") around the Great Lakes from the French founding of Canada to the American invasion of the Ohio country after the Revolution. Subsequent survey works of early America often adopt White's concept of the middle ground as the standard explanatory paradigm for that time and place, as well as for looking at Indian-white interactions elsewhere (e.g., Fred Anderson's The Cruciible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 and Alan Taylor's American Colonies). Less narrative history than an ethnographical effort to understand how Indians and whites created a unique society over the course to two centuries. Does much to dispel old stereotypes we grew up with.