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Recommendations for General Histories

Loss Leader said:
No, but I read a great book about the Plague called Black something or other. Anyway, you didn't want to be in Europe in 1347 or, if you did, you wanted to avoid being bitten by fleas.
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Right. You might as well tell George W. Bush to avoid being bitten by stupid.
 
hgc said:
Right. You might as well tell George W. Bush to avoid being bitten by stupid.
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There were ways to do it. The Pope or some bishop or something spent the plague sitting between two fires. This actually worked as the fires kept the fleas away from him.
 
I second two of the recommendations here

Gibbon - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
It's not easy to read, but worth the effort.
Will (and later Will & Ariel) Durant - History of Civilization. Particularly the earlier volumes.
(Both of the above, though, are rather "meaty"..... Gibbon was originally 8 volumes, although it's been "shrunk", not condensed, to 3 by Everyman's Library - and the Durant series is a life's work - fourteen volumes and they're all over a thousand pages! I think I've managed to read every volume of both, but not in order - they're in linear format, so you can read the sections that you are interested in, individually. Over about 25 years, I've made my way back to them hundreds of times, but I never bookmarked anything, so I can't say for certain that I've actually gone through every chapter of either.)

Seeing as to where I reside, my major disappointment has been in trying to locate a keep-on-the-bedside-table-worthy history of China. I think the the scope of the project requires another lifetime dedication like the Durants'. I'd like to recommend a "best so far", but I can't. Most of the readings I do on Chinese history are from University archives (the ones I can get into). If anyone knows a good tome, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
 
Foolmewunz said:
I second two of the recommendations here

Gibbon - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
It's not easy to read, but worth the effort.
Will (and later Will & Ariel) Durant - History of Civilization. Particularly the earlier volumes.
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Respectfully, I do not. It has nothing to do with how accurate or thorough these works are; it's just that anything that comes in volumes is probably not appropriate for a general survey. I enjoy the single slim history book, even if the topic is very narrow. I know I will get a full story and be able to put it down. The last one I read, which I don't recommend unless you are a Civil War or Navy buff, was "Sea of Grey" about the remarkable voyage of the CSS Shenandoah.
 
Loss Leader said:
Respectfully, I do not. It has nothing to do with how accurate or thorough these works are; it's just that anything that comes in volumes is probably not appropriate for a general survey. I enjoy the single slim history book, even if the topic is very narrow. I know I will get a full story and be able to put it down. The last one I read, which I don't recommend unless you are a Civil War or Navy buff, was "Sea of Grey" about the remarkable voyage of the CSS Shenandoah.
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Oh, I concur on the "weightiness", which is why I put in the disclaimer, but as overall material, they're excellent, and I often find something that's intriguing in one or the other and then read further.

I agree on "drilling down", too. (e.g. I'd rather read Lomask's two volumes on Aaron Burr than an overall history of the early years of the American republic.)

BTW, Polaris.... above is a great recommendation - Milton Lomask, Burr. And, fairly, I think Vidal does Aaron Burr justice in his novel of the same name, although it is a novelization.
 
Foolmewunz said:
I agree on "drilling down", too. (e.g. I'd rather read Lomask's two volumes on Aaron Burr than an overall history of the early years of the American republic.)
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A great book I just read on the early days of the republic is Infamous Scribblers. It's the history of the newspaper in the colonies and the early days of the nation. As a different way of viewing society, it's fantastic.
 
Century of War by Gabriel Kolko is a general social history of war in the 20th century that I found a most interesting, albeit dry reading.
Kiwiwriter said:
These folks also wanted to whitewash their boss. They claimed Hitler never watched the gruesome film of the July 20th plotters being hanged with piano wire. However, Speer said it was one of Hitler's favorite films, and he watched it over and over again. On that, I'd go with Speer.
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Hm, if I recall correctly from reading Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth Speer actually claimed the opposite: Hitler ordered the film of the execution to be made but couldn't stomach watching it.
 
For general histories I recommend Fernandez-Armesto's Millenium and Civilizations.

AJP Taylor for WW2, but you really need a couple of bookshelves-full to get a grasp of that, starting with the Spanish-American War in the Pacific and the Franco-Prussian affair in Europe.

Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly is illuminating. As in, showing us that it was ever thus. SNAFU.

Steven Mithen's After the Ice : A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC is good. There's a lot of human-interest stuff but that can be skipped easily enough. A lot of sound information as well.

I can recommend Gibbon as a read, but not as a way to understand Rome. I definitely recommend John Julius Norwich's three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire. And his history of Venice. All of his stuff, really.

Winston Churchill is worth reading to get an insight into the thinking of people like Winston Churchill in his day. As History it's otherwise useless. For a history of Britain (the original English-Speaking World) read Frances Pryor's Britain BC and Britain AD. The "AD" covers the so-called Dark Ages, not the whole span.
 
CapelDodger said:
. For a history of Britain (the original English-Speaking World) read Frances Pryor's Britain BC and Britain AD. The "AD" covers the so-called Dark Ages, not the whole span.
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Actually, for a very short and entertaining look into England during the dark ages, pick up the very light "1000 AD." I think I read it in one morning.
 
Loss Leader said:
I know it doesn't sound like a history book, but this volume taught me more about the ebb and flow of human history than any other: Salt, by Mark Kurlansky.
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Have you read Seeds of Change : Six Plants that Transformed Mankind by Henry Hobhouse? The plants being quinine, sugar, tea, cotton, the potato, and coca. Quinine may seem unlikely but it made the European penetration of Africa possible, and that happened long after their penetration of the Far East. Six ways of drilling-down through history.

For a more detailed take on quinine there's The Miraculous Fever-Tree by Fiammetta Rocco.

I'm currently reading The Voices of Morebath by Eamon Duffy, a study of a nondescript Devonshire parish during the English Reformation. Morebath happens to be very well documented by the parish priest in the Churchwarden's reports (that he clearly wrote and presented to the parishioners) covering the 1520's to 50's. The priest was Sir Christopher Trichay pronounced Tricky - and therefore possibly related to our own Tricky of great renown.

What if everything you think you know about human motivation is wrong? What if there are simple themes underlying the most complex events? Salt lets you in on the idea that there is more to history than historians are able to tell.
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You need an overall sense of how things have gone for humans over the last few thousand years before the detail makes sense. Once you have that, the single themes that have nothing to do with royalty or politics but everything to do with normal life are the most revealing. It doesn't take politics or war to make salt important, it's more likely the other way around. Temporary disruptions aside, the salt must flow, and it will. Where tea or coca have flowed, they will continue to flow.
 
Loss Leader said:
A great book I just read on the early days of the republic is Infamous Scribblers. It's the history of the newspaper in the colonies and the early days of the nation. As a different way of viewing society, it's fantastic.
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You've introduced that very high-up on my must-read list. The roots of the US newspaper business a century before Mark Twain - who could resist?
 
hgc said:
I'll soon be reading A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman. I hear it's fantastic. Anyone read it?
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Yes I have, and you shouldn't miss it. Nobody should. As you read it - and Barbara Tuchman is very readable - keep today's Western world in mind. The sense of inherited entitlement, the denial of uncomfortable news, the cynical appea of politicians to some god's favour, the increasing economic divide between the majority have-nots and the shrinking minority of have-yachts ...

Europe escaped from that morass mostly because the Atlantic is much smaller than the Pacific so the Western World was born on New World resources. Now the Western World imports resources, on balance. And there's no New World to exploit. Not in the medium-future, anyway.
 
CapelDodger said:
Have you read Seeds of Change : Six Plants that Transformed Mankind by Henry Hobhouse? The plants being quinine, sugar, tea, cotton, the potato, and coca.
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I'm just finishing "The Omnivore's Dilemna" by Pollan. I was going to read his "Botony of Desire" next but your suggestion sounds equally interesting.

And, while Omnivore is not a history book, I do have to say that it is probably the most important book I've read on the food industry. "Fast Food Nation" talked about the problems but was short on solutions. Omnivore actually offered solutions and I have started to implement them. I only tell you because I need, like, two hundred million people to do it simultaniously for it to work.
 
Polaris said:
I've decided to go back to basics for a while with my reading, and I'd like to know if anybody has recommendations for some general histories of various events.

The topics:
Europe
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"europe" by dr. norman davies. I love the fact that he doesn't at all ignore the smaller nations, such as the finns, the flemings, the welsh, etc.

World War Two
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The best survey of the subject that i've yet found is probably "a world at arms" by dr. gerhard weinberg. Certainly check it out.
 
Speaking of Barbara Tuchman, I'd suggest two books by her that are a great reading experience when read back to back. The first is Proud Tower. Here she examines, by a country to country survey, the prevailing political, philsophical and cultural tenants of 'fin de seicle' Europe. In The Guns of August, she shows how those tenants coupled with the house of cards that was pre-war Europe, led to the First World War. Speaking of WWI, John Keegan's, The First World War offers a military historian's take on the event and it's battles, but also takes the time to show how WWI was a mere prelude to the horrors of WWII. Did someone mention WWII? Check out Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler. Rosenbaum takes on the historiography behind the different theories used to explain the evil that was Hitler and the Third Reich. Excellent for its challenging tenor in the search for some semblance of historical truth. Finally, you might be interested in Dark Continent: Europe in the 20th Century by Mark Mazower. While writing a comprehensive survey of the brutality of 20th Century Europe, Mazower also focuses on what Europe's future might be in light of such devastating events. Just wanted to add that I have been enjoying the thread....been some interesting recommendations.
 
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - A History of Nazi Germany by William Shirer
 
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