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Any particular time period or army served in
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Dec 31, 2023 02:42
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Lawman 0 posted:Looking for some general history book suggestions for the new year! Very grateful to last year's secret santa for getting me Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 and Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. Taught me a lot not just about the city, but about the evolution of cities in general, and about America and the modern world at large.
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Dec 31, 2023 04:31
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Lawman 0 posted:Looking for some general history book suggestions for the new year! He's a journalist, not an historian, but Colin Dickey's Under the Eye of Power is one of the best books I've read this year. Dickey takes the position that Hofstadter didn't take his thesis in "The Paranoid Style" far enough - that the United States has always had a pronounced streak of conspiratorial thinking in its political life and we need to stop treating it as an aberration every time it gains traction. He talks about everything from Freemason conspiracies to slaveholders' paranoia about the Underground Railroad to QAnon. It's a great read.
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Dec 31, 2023 16:01
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Sounds pretty interesting will check out.
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Dec 31, 2023 16:12
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Lawman 0 posted:Sounds pretty interesting will check out. Same. I downloaded the sample on my kindle
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Dec 31, 2023 17:10
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Anyone got any recommendations for books about Nepal?
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Jan 1, 2024 00:37
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I’m reading Six Frigates. It’s extremely good. I’m not going to let this turn me into a boat guy.
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Jan 5, 2024 02:43
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Gripweed posted:I’m reading Six Frigates. It’s extremely good. I’m not going to let this turn me into a boat guy. If you're reading Six Frigates at all, and don't want to be a boat guy, I have bad news
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Jan 5, 2024 03:10
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You're already a boat guy OP.
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Jan 5, 2024 03:17
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Gripweed posted:I’m reading Six Frigates. It’s extremely good. I’m not going to let this turn me into a boat guy. do NOT read Castles of Steel
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Jan 5, 2024 03:19
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Gripweed posted:I’m reading Six Frigates. It’s extremely good. I’m not going to let this turn me into a boat guy. Avast, your mainbrace has already been spliced. VostokProgram posted:do NOT read Castles of Steel Genuinely don't read Dreadnought though. I got like 400 pages into that and dude still was not talking about boats. (if you're interested in pre-WW1 and not actually anything about boats it's fine though)
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Jan 5, 2024 03:28
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VostokProgram posted:do NOT read Castles of Steel admiral beatty fuckin sucked, all my homies respect jellicoe
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Jan 5, 2024 04:10
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VostokProgram posted:do NOT read Castles of Steel I wanted to like this book so much, but it turns out that everyone was actually terrified of having a big battleship throwdown, so they just didn't, and it made me kind of lose interest even though the book was well written.
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Jan 5, 2024 06:53
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TheCog posted:I wanted to like this book so much, but it turns out that everyone was actually terrified of having a big battleship throwdown, so they just didn't, and it made me kind of lose interest even though the book was well written. I had a similar experience, my knowledge of WW1 was close to zero so I didn't realise that a big naval battle never really happened. I enjoyed the book though, when you know nothing about a subject, history can have a lot of suspense I also enjoyed how everyone was some kind of eccentric back then.
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Jan 5, 2024 10:57
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Chapter 2 of The Path to Power, and Caro is already dropping bombs about just how rapaciously cruel Gilded Age power elites were. Heartbreaking description of how any attempt of the common folk to create self-help cooperatives was crushed by merchants and bankers who saw that the exploitees were trying to escape.
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Jan 5, 2024 11:44
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Any reccs for books about Benjamin Franklin? Don't know why I want one, just have the urge to read in depth about this weird dude.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:02
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EoinCannon posted:I had a similar experience, my knowledge of WW1 was close to zero so I didn't realise that a big naval battle never really happened. I enjoyed the book though, when you know nothing about a subject, history can have a lot of suspense yeah. i was reading the war that ended peace a book i very much reccomend, and its mostly about the origins of ww1 and alot of the early stuff is basicaly just how willie wanted to have a bigger better navey then england and Dreadnought arms race was the nuclear build up of its day, and because of how ww1 was fought, it never happened outside one battle. https://www.amazon.com/The-War-That...aps%2C87&sr=8-1
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Jan 5, 2024 17:07
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chibi luda posted:Any reccs for books about Benjamin Franklin? Don't know why I want one, just have the urge to read in depth about this weird dude. I liked The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon Wood, but I read it because I like Gordon Wood. You might find one of the more comprehensive biographies more interesting, as there are quite a few by good historians, but I haven't read any of them.
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Jan 5, 2024 17:25
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah. i was reading the war that ended peace a book i very much reccomend, and its mostly about the origins of ww1 and alot of the early stuff is basicaly just how willie wanted to have a bigger better navey then england and Dreadnought arms race was the nuclear build up of its day, and because of how ww1 was fought, it never happened outside one battle. This is why I refuse to become a boat guy. The first world war can be blamed directly on The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. And therefore all WW1's knockon effects, which includes WW2 and basically all bad things that happened in the 20th century are the fault of Alfred Thayer Mahan liking boats too much.
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Jan 5, 2024 17:46
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Six frigates owns so much. He talks about how the US government offered cash prizes to any American who could build some kind of contraption and successfully use it to blow up a British ship. After detailing the various Looney Tunes-esque adventures this spawned, it ends with just a fantastic sentence.
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Jan 8, 2024 03:54
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Gripweed posted:This is why I refuse to become a boat guy. The first world war can be blamed directly on The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. And therefore all WW1's knockon effects, which includes WW2 and basically all bad things that happened in the 20th century are the fault of Alfred Thayer Mahan liking boats too much. I found mahans book on audible unabridged and I am tempted to buy it and give it a listen.
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Jan 8, 2024 12:51
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FPyat posted:Chapter 2 of The Path to Power, and Caro is already dropping bombs about just how rapaciously cruel Gilded Age power elites were. Heartbreaking description of how any attempt of the common folk to create self-help cooperatives was crushed by merchants and bankers who saw that the exploitees were trying to escape. The entire series is more of an intimate examination of how power really works in America than just a simple biography of LBJ. Too bad we'll likely never get the Vietnam volume, thanks Covid!
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Jan 8, 2024 13:12
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I am looking for some weird lightish history book. something in the vein of The King of Confidence A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch. like weird hosed up religious history stuff.
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Jan 8, 2024 14:27
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Maybe check out Chris Jenning's Paradise Now? It's an overview of the American utopian movements of the early/mid 19th century, but it's told with real interest in and affection for its weird participants.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:47
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Not quite as weird or fun but The Emperor of all Maladies: a biography of cancer is well done and engaging. It also manages to be fairly optimistic despite the motherfucking downer of a subject and you leave pretty staggered at just how much progress we've made in that field in the last hundred years. Seriously, cancer is a gently caress but goddamn people are recovering from so much poo poo today that would have been a death sentence pre-WW2.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:55
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I am looking for some weird lightish history book. something in the vein of The King of Confidence The Bloody White Baron, about a Russian noble who decided to take advantage of the chaos of the civil war to try to become the Khan of a new Mongol Empire.
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Jan 8, 2024 18:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:Not quite as weird or fun but The Emperor of all Maladies: a biography of cancer is well done and engaging. It also manages to be fairly optimistic despite the motherfucking downer of a subject and you leave pretty staggered at just how much progress we've made in that field in the last hundred years. i really liked that book. i thought the first half was better then the second half. I kinda got bored when it spent 5 chapters on tabacco which while interesting, wasnt as interesting as farber and how different treatment plans evolved over time. Grand Fromage posted:The Bloody White Baron, about a Russian noble who decided to take advantage of the chaos of the civil war to try to become the Khan of a new Mongol Empire. read that years ago.
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Jan 8, 2024 20:09
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I am looking for some weird lightish history book. something in the vein of The King of Confidence You might like Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface, by David Standish.
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Jan 8, 2024 21:27
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Is Rick Perlstein good at discussing economics and monetary supply? Given their importance in the 70s, I want to know if I’d be better off with another book when it comes to understanding the policy decisions made.
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Jan 9, 2024 06:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:Not quite as weird or fun but The Emperor of all Maladies: a biography of cancer is well done and engaging. It also manages to be fairly optimistic despite the motherfucking downer of a subject and you leave pretty staggered at just how much progress we've made in that field in the last hundred years. I enjoyed this one too It's a little bit worrying but kind of understandable that cancer research through history attracted brilliant but intense dudes that got obsessed with things and defended their own pet procedures beyond the point of rationality. And yeah I know several people who are still alive or had their lives extended by several years that wouldn't have if their diagnosis was 15 years earlier
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Jan 9, 2024 06:49
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FPyat posted:Is Rick Perlstein good at discussing economics and monetary supply? Given their importance in the 70s, I want to know if I’d be better off with another book when it comes to understanding the policy decisions made. It's not really the focus of his books, no. He'll gesture at it, along with stuff like the early 70s energy crisis, but most of his books on the history of the post-war conservative movement deal heavily with cultural currents. To the extent that economic questions are discussed, it's mostly an examination of where the conservative movement got its financial backing.
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Jan 9, 2024 12:29
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He approaches those questions from a left keynesian perspective, I guess you could say. He does address them to some extent, but I don't think there is any meaningful consensus on the economic issues of the 70s, so I don't begrudge him for sacrificing meandering into those debates to move the narrative along. One book that offers a variety of perspectives is the essay collection, The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, but I think that the questions of 70s political economy are a live wire and that collection only begins the debate.
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Jan 9, 2024 17:04
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My copy of Only The Good Die Young shipped. Kinda takes some of the gloss off of Jacobin having them all printed and ready to go if they took a month to ship them.
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Jan 10, 2024 18:06
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Hello history book thread, I'm looking for recommendations on a couple of subjects.* First of all I want to know more about the "commercialisation" of faith in the Catholic Church before the Reformation. I'm talking about selling of indulgences, pardoners-for-hire, prayers for souls in Purgatory... basically all the stuff that Martin Luther was hopping mad about. Secondly I'm interested generally in how people lived in cities at that time (15th-16th century, or a bit earlier). What jobs they did, where they got their food, what social structures shaped their lives, that sort of thing. *Incidentally, the last book rec'd to me in this thread was Diarmaid MacCullough's A History of Christianity, which was fantastic, so cheers for that.
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Jan 12, 2024 05:41
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For your second recommendation, check out The Faithful Executioner. It’s about the life of an executioner named Frank Schmidt in Germany in that time period. It’s very good. Based on his notes he took of his life, which are pretty much one of a kind for that combination of time period and profession
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Jan 12, 2024 10:59
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blue squares posted:For your second recommendation, check out The Faithful Executioner. It’s about the life of an executioner named Frank Schmidt in Germany in that time period. It’s very good. Based on his notes he took of his life, which are pretty much one of a kind for that combination of time period and profession It's Franz, but seconded.
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Jan 12, 2024 11:23
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Hannibal Rex posted:It's Franz, but seconded. haha, phone posted and the autocorrect got me
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Jan 12, 2024 12:16
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Hannibal Rex posted:It's Franz, but seconded. now i picture danny davito in a dark comedy adaptation. id watch it. "lesson number 250 kid, if they dont tip you above 25%, you dull the blade a bit, the less the tip, the duller the blade".
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Jan 12, 2024 14:19
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It's more like "Maybe we shouldn't drown unwedded mother who committed infanticide to death, let them have a quick beheading instead."
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Jan 12, 2024 21:17
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blue squares posted:For your second recommendation, check out The Faithful Executioner. It’s about the life of an executioner named Frank Schmidt in Germany in that time period. It’s very good. Based on his notes he took of his life, which are pretty much one of a kind for that combination of time period and profession Oh, this sounds really interesting. Definitely going on the list. I also just remembered a book I read last year that I want to recommend: Image on the Edge by Michael Camille. It's a survey of medieval marginal artwork, mainly focused on books, but also looking at the "margins" of architecture (e.g. parts of cathedrals that couldn't be seen from the ground). I picked it up expecting just a funny collection of Weird Medieval Guys, but it actually goes way more into depth about art and culture, the way the marginal illustrations comment on the text, and how they undermine certain social conventions while reinforcing others.
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Jan 13, 2024 21:46
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