I would check out the Digital Public Library of America: https://dp.la/

Although, I would assume their licensing agreement says you can use it if you leave the water marks on.

The other thing I would check would be various state's historical societies. Mine has a big digital collection. But, once again, I'm pretty sure they allow use of it for certain things but you have to keep the water mark and credit them.

I'm not sure how much stuff they have online, but there's also the National Television and Radio Museum. https://ncrtv.org/

Here's a good book talk with him from the Free Library of Philadelphia.

http://libwww.freelibrary.org/podcast/episode/2003

There's never one single cause to something like this. The other poster mentioned shipping, and German attacks on American shipping was a big part of it. The Zimmerman telegram was the final straw. But there were concerns about loans to England and France and there was natural affinity to for England that Americans tend towards in foreign policy. There were other ideas that France and England were more similar to democracies that Germany and Austro-Hungaria.

So, it was a confluence of all those factors, some being more important like shipping. Some being harder to quantify, like natural sympathy for the English.

In re: to the Nanjing massacre, it wasn't a communist government at the time. And there is a lot of contemporary reporting of the issue. The stories of atrocities coming out of China were the motivation for the US to impose sanctions on Japan. So, at the time it was fairly well known what was going on.

Also, the war crimes tribunals set up after the war went through a lot of effort to document what happened. This was in the hands of the allied powers, but was mostly done by the US and the UK b/c of Russia's limited participation in the PTO until the very end of the war.

In regards to Korea, they have a lot of mineral resources that Japan needed.

There was a good /r/askhistorians about this if you're curious.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6batyz/why_would_ben_franklin_call_germans_and_swedes/

Kind of strangely, I had the Friedrich Katz bio of Pancho Villa in mind when I said this one was short and didn't get overly involved. That Villa bio was like 700ish pages before the notes and was comprehensive, but I didn't actually care that much and didn't really have the background to understand a lot of the more intricate political in fighting.

The camps in the US where Japanese Americans were interned or the Japanese camps where they interned people in places like Shanghai and Manila?

This is the 1810 rebellion, not the 1910 revolution.

I read Morelos in Mexico by W. H. Timmons. It's an older book from the early 70s I just stumbled upon in a used shop but I was curious about him and the Mexican independence movement so I picked it up.

If you don't know a lot about the principal players or actions during the the Mexican rebellion of the 1810s then I would say this is worth checking out. Especially if you can find it cheap in a thrift store like I did. I'm sure there's more up to date stuff or more comprehensive stuff but this was good b/c it was fairly short, 170ish pages with decent sized type and margins so you felt like you were making good progress. And it didn't assume a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader. I thought it was a great introduction to the topic.

Various state historical societies video tape their events. You can look for their youtube channels. My local societies is here: https://www.youtube.com/@oregonhistory/videos

There's similar ones for groups focused on more defined areas, like Gilder Lehrman has a channel for US Civil War stuff. https://www.youtube.com/@gilderlehrman

Gilder Lehrman recently had an event at Yale specifically for teachers. I they had a big wig there too. I can't remember if it was Eric Foner or David Blight

Also, CSPAN's author talks are fun. Or you can just search for authors and books you like to find talks by those people. Lots of bookstores started putting up their author events during the pandemic.

In the US the narrative of colonization for religious reasons gets over played b/c it's a nice story. But what really drives colonies are institutions, usually financial. England was set up to make more money off of colonies b/c it's institutions, like corporations, banks, credit systems, shipping, etc. were set up to exploit those opportunities. The French just weren't at the same scale.

It depends a lot on what the goods were, where they were going, etc. A lot of voyages were speculative and instead of wages, the crew would get a proportion of the profits from the voyage. How big a share you got was determined by your rank. So, you would sign on to sail to Goa and pick up spices. You'd go down and hopefully not die, then come back, or jump ship if there was a more lucrative looking offer, and sail back. When your cargo of spices are sold, it's accounted for and you're given an allotment commiserate with your rank and whether and for the length you spent on the ship during that voyage.

The other poster mentioned advances. Those became more essential and expected over time. Sailors needed money to support their families while they were gone if they had one. They had to settle debts. Etc.

Also, some things we don't count as wages were considered wages back then. The most important was the food and beer rations. Nicer food/beer was seen as a better wage. They also had the opportunity to pick up some rare goods to take back and sale on their own.

Also, if the vessel had passengers, the crew had opportunities to earn tips to supplement their wages.

There's a scholar named Lewis Fischer who did a lot of work on this topic. He's got a couple books out and if you've got JSTOR you can find papers.

You might dig When France Fell. It's about the Anglo-American relationship with Vichy. De Gaulle figures in b/c he was just kind of a difficult person to work wth.

You can hear an interview with the author here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/when-france-fell

In one of the last few weeks /u/dropbear123 reviewed Cry Havoc by Joe Maiolo and said it compared favorably to Tooze in some aspects of readability.
Here's an interview with Maiolo if you're curious about it. https://newbooksnetwork.com/joe-maiolo-cry-havoc-how-the-arms-race-drove-the-world-to-war-1931-1941

The Gordon Wood one is highly regarded. Also, Five Books has this article on the best Ben Franklin books: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/benjamin-franklin-d-g-hart/

Walter Isaacson's got one too. He's not a dedicated historian of the period but his bioraphies are popular. http://libwww.freelibrary.org/podcast/episode/892

You could also read Kelsa Pellettiere's piece in the Bulkwart from when the Ken Burns doc came out. You can also hit her up on twitter where she's Franklin Fangirl or something. https://www.thebulwark.com/ken-burns-pbs-documentary-review-the-worldly-ben-franklin/

I haven't read the Weitz book. But I've had When Money Dies by Fergusson on my TBR pile for a while and it looks like something you might be interested in. It's kind of old, so it's hard to find a recent review of it. But maybe that means you'll be able to find a cheap used copy.

I read Mai Ngai's The Chinese Question. It was interesting and helpful b/c she tied in anti-Chinese sentiment from the US, Australia, and South Africa to show how they influenced each other. I know it's ridiculous to expert her to know every language, but I would have liked to have learned more about Chinese immigration to Peru.

I think there are some interesting lessons to learn about changing rationales in racism and the economic importance of the transnational Chinese community to China in terms of remittances and reinvestment in the home country.

I thought the book maybe over focused on S. Africa, but I put that down to that subject most likely having more archival resources.

There's a book by Carl Nightingale called Segregation. It was kind of dry, but it would be a good complement to Ngai's book. Overall if you have any interest in Chinese migration in the late 19th/early 20th century I would recommend Ngai's book.

This isn't really helpful, but Stephen Metcalf has been writing one for like the last decade and I wish he would finish it up. Rick Perlstein has one called Reaganland. I heard some interviews with him and I don't know if I totally buy his argument, but overall I think it's a good look at the decade. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/books/review/reaganland-rick-perlstein.html

Kate Masur's book, Til Justice Done, is about the civil rights movement in the antebellum period and the Souths' constant reaching and imposition on Northern states really started to drive civil rights in the 1850s. A lot of states expanded citizenship to Black Americans during that period, that's part of what Dred Scott was about. States were also trying to force equal application of the privileges and immunities clause, etc. Ohio really did a 180 during the period and is an instructive example.

I just heard a good interview with Taylor on The Rogue Historian podcast. They talked about the New Orleans Native Guard and explained what was really going on with it during the Confederacy, since it's often used as an example of Black Confederates.

Here's a good interview with Hoyer over at The New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/blood-and-iron

It kind of depends. The dynamics of book clubs vary a lot.

Hopefully there's going to be a facilitator of some kind. They usually prepare some questions to help get everyone talking. My experience with library groups is usually someone from the library handles this.
If it's a fiction book things are usually a lot looser. You talk more about impressions, feelings, themes, likes and dislikes, things people appreciated about the characters, etc.

Non-fiction will usually be more about what people learned, how it compares with other things people have read on the topic or differences from preconceptions.

Usually there's a few people who are more likely to talk. With a library group I'm guessing there's a couple older people who go frequently and already know each other. They'll probably be more talkative.

But it's about as low stakes a social thing as you can get. You've got a topic, a mutual interest, and someone will almost certainly show up not having read the book, so you'll be more prepared than they are.

Depending on how social your group is or other connections you can go off on a lot of tangents.

This is a version of environmental determinism. It basically comes out of the Victorian "race science" with things like phrenology and it's bunk. It starts from a bad assumption and then works backwards. So, it starts by assuming Anglo Saxon protestant and Nordic peoples are the superior race and then tries to make up evidence to support it.

There was just as much democratic tradition in the Americas, Polynesia, Australia, and Africa, but b/c a decision was already made about those cultures the evidence was either ignored, or more often not even considered. Ideas of tribal communities with all power chiefs was assumed to be their system of governance and that was that.

It was mostly used as a justification of colonialism and imperialism. In the Americas it's also very closely tied to the justifications of genocide and land appropriation of the indigenous residents.

On top of that, it just doesn't make sense. Florida is also a peninsula. Korea is also a peninsula, south east Asia is basically peninsula after peninsula. There's mountains pretty much everywhere and the biggest mountains are in Asia. There's natural harbors along pretty much every coast and some places, like the Gulf of Mexico is basically one big harbor. The Americas were probably the most forested land in the world, and still are. No one is looking at Brazil for examples of democracy.

No respected historians believe it b/c it's so easy to find counterexamples.

Just so people are clear on timelines, Reconstruction ended with the election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 and election of Hayes. Then the US entered a period generally known as Redemption in the south. It started a little earlier than 1877 and was more powerful in different places, and continued until the early 1910s. The violence in Wilmington is part of that period and redemption is marked by racial violence against Black Americans, the solidifying of Democrat Party rule of the South, Lochner Era jurisprudence gutting the 14th and 15th Amendment, and the development of Jim Crow and segregation.

After WWI, there was a period of racist violence from 1919 to about 1923 that generally coincides with the kicking off with the Red Summer. Chicago's famous riot in 1919 is considered part of the Red Summer. The Rosewood massacre in Florida happened near the end of this period, where there are still incidence of racist violence but they don't happen as frequently and aren't was wide spread.

Tulsa was part of that wave of violence. It's tied to the push by Black Americans for Civil Rights, partially based on their service in WWI and is marked by frequent lynching of veterans returning to the south. There was a pretty consistent pattern of attacking and stealing Black wealth, whether it's things like the looting and burning of Greenwood in Tulsa, or the stealing of land in places like Rosewood.

To build on /u/Doctor_Impossible_ answer, the person usually counted as the final casualty in the war was a US soldier, Henry Gunther who was taking part in the Meuse -Argonne offensive. It was a joint offensive by the US and France. Gunther apparently died at 10:59.

But France especially was pushing for these advances up until the last minute. They had suffered extraordinary casualties and now that they had US reinforcements, new and better tactics, and restored morale they were trying to get every benefit they could out of the fighting before armistice.