Hi all. As the title says, I'm looking for recommendations on books about African American history. I'm Irish and I know the basics about the civil rights movement and some other bits through documentaries like 13th . Outside of that I've realized that my understanding of what African Americans have been though over the last couple of hundred years is pretty piss poor. I'd really like to educate myself a bit more, so any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

I've recently become interested in exploring history. However, though I am usually quick to read and process large amounts of information in other genres, I find myself struggling with the dates in history books. For example, here's a excerpt from the book I'm currently reading [1]:

During this period, tsarist policy was contradictory along its Western borders. In Finland, a Parliament was convened in 1863 for the first time in fifty-four years. In 1860, its own currency, the Finnish markka, was introduced, initially tied to the Russion rouble before being tied to the value of silver from 1865, which enabled the Duchy to trade more easily with the West. By 1906, Parliament had passed 400 separate pieces of legislation, and by 1883, Finnish had equal status as a language to Russian.

It takes me surprisingly long to process this; my mind struggles to put together the timeline and most relevant facts. This style is used throughout the whole book and others like it, where multiple dates (and names or facts) are mentioned in a short piece of text, often in seemingly random order. This makes it difficult for me to truly get something out the book -- either I don't remember the information well afterwards or I can't relax while reading because I'm constantly puzzling it together.

For people more familiar with historical works: are there any tricks to this? Does it perhaps get easier in time, when you become more familiar with the genre (similar to keeping track of the characters in fantasy books like Game of Thrones)? Or do some people have a natural affinity for dates, same as others have a mind for numbers or for languages? Looking forward to hearing your opinions and experiences.

[1] N. Taylor, "Estonia, A Modern History", 2nd edition, C. Hurst & Co, 2020.

Update: This was my first post here, and I’m loving the thoughtful replies. Here’s a summary of the tips so far:

• Combining specific dates into a higher level time periods, e.g. start/middle/late century.
• Using historical dates with a personal meaning as anchors to keep an overview of the time period.
• Paying special attention to the first line of each paragraph, the first section of each chapter, and the first chapter of each book, which should be a summary of the following paragraph, chapter, and book, respectively.
• Writing or drawing your own timeline of events, outside of the book.
• Adding context information to your own timeline, based on understanding why each event occurred in that time and that way.

If everything had worked perfectly, it still would have been a bum airplane." - Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the United States attempted to design nuclear powered aircraft. This was part of a larger "nuclear craze" in the era where everything and anything was proposed to have nuclear technology applied to it. This led to all kinds of things like the Chrysler TV-8 and "peaceful" earthmoving construction projects. The only place where nuclear power or propulsion really took off was for large ocean going ships both for military navies as well as civilian tankers, cargo ships and icebreakers. Spacecraft technology was the only other "success story."

Nuclear powered aircraft, while more realistic than say nuclear cars, never quite caught on except for a few experimental engines and just one actual working aircraft. The most extensive efforts towards this during the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program were the HTRE-2 and HTRE-3 experimental nuclear reactors with heat transfer assemblies designed for nuclear powered aircraft at the Idaho National Laboratory. Rather than burning fuel, the jet turbine would use the heat from the nuclear reaction to heat air sent through a compressor which would then be expelled as exhaust for thrust.

On of the more fascinating tests were the test flights of the NB-36H which while conventionally powered, flew while carrying a working nuclear reactor to test the protective shielding of the crew. It carried an air-cooled 1 megawatt reactor. The engineers and crew worked within a specially shielded nose cabin with 12-inch-thick lead-glass windows.

The project was canceled by the Kennedy administration a few months after taking office in 1961 citing high costs, poor management, and little progress towards a flight ready reactor saying:

At the time of termination, the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program was still in the research and development stage, with primary emphasis on high performance reactors. Although a number of research and development achievements can be credited to this program, at the time of termination an airplane had never been flown on nuclear power nor had a prototype airplane been built. - Joseph Campbell, Comptroller General

and

Nearly 15 years and about $1 billion have been devoted to the attempted development of a nuclear-powered aircraft; but the possibility of achieving a militarily useful aircraft in the foreseeable future is still very remote. - John F. Kennedy, POTUS

Footnote: This post is a rework of a reddit post I made here a couple years back. It's not really meant to be a coherent or lengthy article but has some links and thoughts which I found interesting.