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Thanks so much for the great and speedy recommendations! And it looks like Born in Blood and Fire and The Death of Artemio Cruz are both available in my town's library, so it looks like I'll be stopping in there for a visit soon. Solaris 2.0 posted:I believe this may have been mentioned in this thread before, but what is the best book on Stalin's purges? I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but I've heard great things from Simon Montfiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. As an in-depth and deeply detailed biography, the purges will no doubt receive a large amount of attention. Also, from my own quick research it seems like The Great Terror is seen as a classic work on the subject. IBroughttheFunk fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Apr 20, 2017 |
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Apr 20, 2017 01:04
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IBroughttheFunk posted:Thanks so much for the great and speedy recommendations! And it looks like Born in Blood and Fire and The Death of Artemio Cruz are both available in my town's library, so it looks like I'll be stopping in there for a visit soon. Conquest's The Great Terror is the classic Cold Warrior account where Stalin is personally responsible for every death and he's just as bad as Hitler and Communism is the ultimate evil. The historiography on this subject is really political and controversial and I wouldn't say there's a single generally agreed "best" book on the purges. Honestly the most balanced account you're going to get will probably be in a Soviet history textbook because they'll review the literature and try to present a balanced look at the subject rather than taking a stance and fighting one half of the literature.
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Apr 20, 2017 02:10
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I know its a bit off topic but Gulag Archipelago is meant to be a great read.
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Apr 20, 2017 02:17
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algebra testes posted:I know its a bit off topic but Gulag Archipelago is meant to be a great read. It is if you have a lot of free time. My copy of volume one is 660 pages.
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Apr 20, 2017 02:19
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vyelkin posted:It is if you have a lot of free time. My copy of volume one is 660 pages. I bought a copy a few years back and never got around to reading it. I honeslty didn't realise there were multiple volumes 
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Apr 20, 2017 02:23
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Subvisual Haze posted:I just finished Rubicon and have realized my knowledge of Rome between Caesar and Constantine is really lacking. Any quality recommendations for the Imperial era? 
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Apr 20, 2017 03:07
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Don't actually.
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Apr 20, 2017 04:00
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The accounts of the purges in The Sword and The Shield are extensive but the scope of the book is much, much broader than just that era and probably wouldn't give you very much in terms of color. The book is a drat good read anyway.
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Apr 20, 2017 04:32
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Disinterested posted:Don't actually. Depends, do you want to know how much a late 18 century Englishman hated Greeks? That is the book for you.
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Apr 20, 2017 05:43
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I believe this may have been mentioned in this thread before, but what is the best book on Stalin's purges?
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Apr 20, 2017 06:16
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A human heart posted:J Arch Getty is generally meant to be 'pretty good'. certainly better than anything by that cretin Montfiore that someone else has suggested Getty is the quintessential revisionist historian of Stalin's purges, in that his early work was heavily criticized for leaving Stalin out almost completely, and since then he's still focused much more on how the purge was driven by factors on the ground and choices by low-ranked party members rather than by Stalin himself. Some of this has changed since the 90s and the archival revolution let us get a look at Stalin's personal files, but seeing to what extent the purges were a decentralized phenomenon is still Getty's thing really. I like his work but some people really don't and even find it offensive.
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Apr 20, 2017 13:38
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CharlestheHammer posted:Depends, do you want to know how much a late 18 century Englishman hated Greeks? i always thought they liked the greeks because of the whole greek revolution against the ottomans thing and it was romanticized?
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Apr 20, 2017 22:00
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vyelkin posted:Getty is the quintessential revisionist historian of Stalin's purges, in that his early work was heavily criticized for leaving Stalin out almost completely, and since then he's still focused much more on how the purge was driven by factors on the ground and choices by low-ranked party members rather than by Stalin himself. Some of this has changed since the 90s and the archival revolution let us get a look at Stalin's personal files, but seeing to what extent the purges were a decentralized phenomenon is still Getty's thing really. I like his work but some people really don't and even find it offensive. its not offensive to suggest that maybe a phenomenon on the scale of the purges might have had something to do with people on the ground rather than 'this guy stalin was really paranoid and crazy'
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Apr 21, 2017 00:34
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A human heart posted:its not offensive to suggest that maybe a phenomenon on the scale of the purges might have had something to do with people on the ground rather than 'this guy stalin was really paranoid and crazy' You would think so, and yet when the wall came down and we got access to the archives and Robert Conquest published a new version of The Great Terror he wanted to subtitle it "I told you so, you loving fools"
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Apr 21, 2017 04:13
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CharlestheHammer posted:Depends, do you want to know how much a late 18 century Englishman hated Greeks? I'll take ten
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Apr 21, 2017 07:38
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i always thought they liked the greeks because of the whole greek revolution against the ottomans thing and it was romanticized? They do but not the ones that took the eastern empire as they totally did it wrong.
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Apr 21, 2017 08:34
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Just read Killers of the Flower-Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. I knew nothing of the subject but had read a lot of Grann's longform articles in the past, which generally involve obsessive research around a central mystery. As a "mystery" alone it's a thrilling read, but as he digs deeper and highlights the sheer scale of murder and injustice the Osage faced, and how the justice system encouraged it all, it's equal parts heartbreaking and infuriating. It actually makes me want to read more about my own country's (Australia's) grimy treatment of Indigenous people. It's a shameful blind spot for me.
snoremac fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Apr 21, 2017 |
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Apr 21, 2017 12:47
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Also Greek Revolution happened after Gibbon's passing.
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Apr 21, 2017 13:22
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Kuiperdolin posted:Also Greek Revolution happened after Gibbon's passing. Yeah, that was a early-mid 19th Century thing. In Gibbons' time, the Greeks were just quiet peasants backwatering away under centuries of Ottoman rule.
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Apr 21, 2017 19:02
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Anyone have any book recommendations covering the Thirty Years War?
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Apr 22, 2017 20:08
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Commissar Canuck posted:Anyone have any book recommendations covering the Thirty Years War? Peter Wilson's book is good.
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Apr 22, 2017 20:15
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Commissar Canuck posted:Anyone have any book recommendations covering the Thirty Years War? Seconding Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy
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Apr 22, 2017 20:16
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HannibalBarca posted:Peter Wilson's book is good. Seconding this its a great book
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Apr 23, 2017 15:18
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HannibalBarca posted:Peter Wilson's book is good. HannibalBarca posted:Peter Wilson's book is good. Also gotta jump on the bandwagon and recommend Wilson's Thirty Years War . Best book written on the subject.
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Apr 23, 2017 21:11
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Tommy_Udo posted:Also gotta jump on the bandwagon and recommend Wilson's Thirty Years War . Best book written on the subject. nth-ing. Phenomenal read.
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Apr 23, 2017 21:26
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Well I guess that settles it, thanks gang!
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Apr 23, 2017 22:18
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On the subject of ancient Rome, I highly suggest any book on the subject penned by Adrian Goldsworthy. Easy to read, but comprehensive. I particularly liked his book about the decline of the Western Empire:
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Apr 23, 2017 23:02
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BigglesSWE posted:On the subject of ancient Rome, I highly suggest any book on the subject penned by Adrian Goldsworthy. Easy to read, but comprehensive. I particularly liked his book about the decline of the Western Empire: I've been thinking about picking up In the Name of Rome since I loved his Caesar biographies so much. Have you read that one?
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Apr 24, 2017 02:06
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MeatwadIsGod posted:I've been thinking about picking up In the Name of Rome since I loved his Caesar biographies so much. Have you read that one? I've read his Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars, very good book. I've been meaning to check out more of his stuff.
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Apr 24, 2017 02:33
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MeatwadIsGod posted:I've been thinking about picking up In the Name of Rome since I loved his Caesar biographies so much. Have you read that one? Afraid not, I read his books on Caesar and Augustus which are quite excellent, and the above mentioned one of course. I also bought "Pax Romana" during my last visit to NYC (We have a pretty lousy market for history books in Sweden) but I haven't really touched it yet.
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Apr 25, 2017 01:52
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A human heart posted:its not offensive to suggest that maybe a phenomenon on the scale of the purges might have had something to do with people on the ground rather than 'this guy stalin was really paranoid and crazy' The point would be that people did not spontaneously start to denounce one another to the authorities, that actions take place within systems and so on. Which does not remove moral culpability from local Party officials who realised that the way to get ahead was to play that dangerous game, obviously.
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Apr 26, 2017 22:58
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vyelkin posted:You would think so, and yet when the wall came down and we got access to the archives and Robert Conquest published a new version of The Great Terror he wanted to subtitle it "I told you so, you loving fools" Conquest never said that; it was a one liner spread around by Martin Amis. Whether Conquest was right or not is also a matter of debate to some extent. Yes he was right that there was terror in the Soviet Union, but the figures his books provided as to the total numbers of victims were inaccurate. Look into the correspondence between him and RW Davies, conducted post-1991 and based on the latter's researches into the Soviet archives.
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Apr 28, 2017 23:38
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A human heart posted:J Arch Getty is generally meant to be 'pretty good'. certainly better than anything by that cretin Montfiore that someone else has suggested I honestly couldn't suggest either Conquest or Getty's books to anyone who isn't a student studying the period. The debate they had just resulted in lots of pointless bickering and accusations being thrown at one another, something which the letters at the bottom of this book article provide a taste of: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n02/j-arch-getty/starving-the-ukraine If you want a straightforward book on this subject I would suggest reading Oleg Khlevniuk's book on the Gulag system or the Stalin biography he published last year. He's rightly unsympathetic towards the Soviet Union but has an excellent command of the source material and never makes a single statement in his works which isn't clearly backed up by the existing documentation.
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Apr 28, 2017 23:44
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cloudchamber posted:I honestly couldn't suggest either Conquest or Getty's books to anyone who isn't a student studying the period. The debate they had just resulted in lots of pointless bickering and accusations being thrown at one another, something which the letters at the bottom of this book article provide a taste of: Khlevniuk is really good. Funnily enough I actually have his History of the Gulag sitting on my desk right now. You can't really go wrong with his work, all of it is really good. The only complaint I can ever really muster about Khlevniuk is that because he literally works at the State Archive of the Russian Federation his work tends to be very focused on actions at the heart of power and other things that get stored in that archive. He knows that material better than anybody and there's an absolute shitload of fascinating stuff in that archive but it does tend to bias his work somewhat towards finding causation at the centre rather than the periphery, since naturally if what you're reading is government documents and Politburo resolutions you're going to be more likely to think that the central government and the Politburo had a very significant impact (not that I disagree with the importance of the centre but I think other historians have also done good work pointing out how the periphery had really significant effects on the course of Stalinism). That being said Khlevniuk is always very conscious of the weaknesses of his sources (for example, the fact that a lot of Soviet government records were falsified in one way or another, for various reasons) and so he treats them with an appropriate amount of skepticism. Really though I'll just reiterate that this remains a really political subject and the historiographical debate over it is far from settled, so there isn't necessarily a single authoritative account that says "X happened in Y way because of Z". We've done a lot of work around the edges but I don't think anyone has yet accomplished the daunting task of writing a definitive history of the Purges/Gulag/Stalinism.
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Apr 28, 2017 23:58
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Looking for a recommendation for book on history of modern Israel. I know little about the founding, leaders, wars, and looking for a credible book on the subject.
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Apr 29, 2017 00:58
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Looking for a recommendation for book on history of modern Israel. I know little about the founding, leaders, wars, and looking for a credible book on the subject. what side are you on
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Apr 29, 2017 04:03
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I recently read The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War by Gelvin and thought it was pretty good. There is of course more to Israel than the I-P conflict, but you can't really escape it. Can anyone recommend a book on the history of Lebanon and Syria? I'm especially interested in the Lebanese Civil War.
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May 2, 2017 08:14
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:There is of course more to Israel than the I-P conflict Do you, or does anyone else, have any recommendations about this? I've got a few books about the conflict, but I'd be interested in books about other aspects of Israeli (or Palestinian) history. Stuff about the British Mandate, or the Ottoman era would be interesting. Maybe something about the relationships between the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jewish communities, or the role of kibbutzim in the development of Israel, or the role of Arabs and other minorities in the society of Israel proper. The conflict and occupation are interesting and important, but I know there are a lot of other interesting themes and issues in the history of the region and I'd like to read more about them.
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May 2, 2017 13:50
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I'm not getting any answers in the military history thread, but are there any works out there that cover the American expeditions in Siberia during World War I? My grandfather's brother served there and the cold apparently stuck with him for the rest of his life.
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May 3, 2017 04:11
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RC and Moon Pie posted:I'm not getting any answers in the military history thread, but are there any works out there that cover the American expeditions in Siberia during World War I? I haven't actually read it yet and it has middling scores on goodreads so I can't really say if it's good or not, but I've been on an ebook downloading kick lately and one of the ones I picked up was When the United States Invaded Russia: Woodrow Wilson's Siberian Disaster by Carl J. Richard.
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May 3, 2017 10:44
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