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rasser posted:I always wanted to read Hitler's Willing Executioners, but I've seen this claim that he's a bad historian repeated too often. It's rarely qualified more than above, and I think it's a drat shame given 1. I would like to read a book on the subject 2. I have no clue which methods a good historian uses, that I might distuingish in a text? This is from a page back, but it deserves some kind of real answer, especially as the question of what a historian actually does and how you judge good vs. bad historical scholarship is really goddamned important for any kind of thread that discusses history books. The best, most accessible, short explanation of what the hell it is that academic historians actually do that I've yet found is this BBC article on the subject. Note that it's 9 pages each with its own unique link on the left there, but if you download the .pdf you get the whole thing. It is well worth a read. As for specific books on the subject of why Germans participated in the Holocaust, Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men is probably the most succinct, accessible introduction to that topic out there. If you're interested in the Goldhagen Controversy the afterward is also an amazing direct counter to Goldhagen. This was necessary in the second edition of Ordinary Men precisely because Goldhagen used a lot of the same records that Browning did and the competing interpretations really needed to be addressed. If you've ever wanted to see the academic version of bitch-slapping someone, this is about as good as it gets.
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Aug 9, 2014 19:00
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Ughhhhhhh gently caress that self promoting war criminal Speer. Maybe, maybe take him with a grain or five of salt if you want to try and figure out what small talk with hitler was like but even then be wary.
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Aug 11, 2014 05:52
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I wouldn't take Shirer as stone-cold infallible cannon either. Rise and Fall was a very important work for the time, and it remains a fairly decent, broad treatment of the general outlines of the causes and the course of the conflict, but there is just a mountain of scholarship that has been undertaken since then and an even bigger mountain of sources that have been examined by historians seeking to understand the era that Shirer either didn't have access to or didn't have time to sift through. Basically it's a book published in 1960 and needs to be understood as such. He gives the Holocaust very short shrift and argues for a very extreme form of the Sonderweg thesis - the idea that there was something uniquely deviant in German history and its developmental path during the early modern era that made the rise of German fascism inevitable - that was controversial even back then.
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Aug 11, 2014 17:05
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Mr.48 posted:Could anyone recommend a good book about the opium wars? It's been almost 10 years, but I read this one back in college. I've got it in a box somewhere. I remember really liking the class it was assigned for and a glance back at a review paper I wrote way back then indicates that I enjoyed the book. I still remember the broad history of those events despite not really doing anything with that topic, so clearly it was effective as well.
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Aug 23, 2014 21:18
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Abu Dave posted:Is there a book similiar to A World Undone but for WW2? Are you specifically looking for a single-volume overview of the events of the war, or an analysis of any particular part, or. . . ? A bit more detail on what you want would help a lot.
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Aug 28, 2014 16:52
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Seams posted:Taylor's analysis of the origins of WWII is definitely out of fashion these days but I wouldn't call it false. It has it's merits as one of the first major works in English which tried to move away from the Hitler-centric viewpoint that had dominated scholarship up until then I want to emphasize this - if you're going to read history you really need to get away from a really hard and set notion of "false vs. correct" when it comes to historical interpretations. They're best taken as being part of an ongoing discussion, and to fully understand that discussion as a whole it's generally best if you're familiar with all the contributions and the order they happen in. Think of it like this: history books are basically the super-OG version of forums posts, only they happen at what's comparatively a glacial pace when taken side by side with your average D&D thread. Think of each book as a separate, distinct post with an author either making his own argument, trying to correct someone else's argument, or just presenting something he thought was neat. Once in a while you'll get some crackpot who actually argues something that's just completely demonstrably wrong, but it's relatively uncommon. Much the same way that it's difficult to jump in at the tail end of a 25 page thread without having at least read the OP and a few key posts in-between, you can't really just grab the latest book on any given historical subject and say that it's the most definitively "right" one.
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Sep 27, 2014 14:34
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BeigeJacket posted:Not sure if this is the right thread, as it's more a current affairs request, but can anyone recommend a good title dealing with modern China, specifically the CCP and how it turned from Maoism to today's market friendly incarnation? Not a history book per se but Philip Pan's Out of Mao's Shadow is pretty good with this. It presupposes a little bit of general background knowledge, but really if you read the wikipedia entries on Mao and Deng Xiaoping you'll be up to speed enough to make the big connections. I've taught it in a few classes and it's really accessible and generally well-liked by students.
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Jan 13, 2015 00:11
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Since when are Venice and Constantinople in the Balkans? Really I think the real question is how provocative you want to be with this. That project would make possible anything from a discussion of Austro-Hungarian labor strikes to a description of very recent mass killings in the actual fields where the deed was done.
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Jan 21, 2015 01:37
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Lordboots posted:Unless I'm terribly mistaken the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul/Constantinople) had quit a lot of the Balkans under its thumb for awhile. As for the recent mass killings and labor strikes, those actually came up as a potential topic! I haven't ruled them out either, but I'm also just trying to explore some options until something jabs out at me. Sure, huge chunks of the balkans were under ottoman rule. But that doesn't make the bosporus part of the balkans any more than it includes anatolia or the mid-east, which were also pieces of the ottoman empire. I'll grant that you might be able to edge in an argument for istanbul being on the edge of the balkans, but there's no way venice is part of that. Personally i'd go with something ww1 related just due to how easy the recent centenary would make basic research, or something about the civil wars for the opportunity to get out of the major cities.
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Jan 21, 2015 03:25
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Azran posted:Okay, this is a messy topic: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I know absolutely nothing about this, and I have no dog in that particular fight, so I want the most objective book (and good) book out there. Any recommendations? Wikipedia. Seriously. If all you want is the basic foundations of who did what when and to whom start there, then explore outward into more interesting sub topics. It's one of the most heavily moderated topics there, so the bullshit is kept on lockdown for the most part.
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Jan 21, 2015 16:58
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vyelkin posted:The reviewer said apparently this quote didn't exist in the place his footnote pointed, so his fabrications may have extended as far as the most important quote in his entire book, not just for minor stuff. Note: I haven't read the book, I don't do Russian history, and I don't give two tin fucks about whether this guy is amazing or the devil himself. No dog in this fight at all. That said, it does have to be noted that most authors of history books have zero say over the title of the book. Publishers pull the most amazing poo poo and will change the title of your work to boost sales at the drop of a hat. My doctoral advisor had the title of a book that he wrote about Germany after World War 2 changed to include the word "Hitler" in it just because their numbers showed that books with "Hitler" in the title sold better than those without. If the source that he points to for that whisperers quote doesn't exist, that's awful and really hard to defend. Still, you need to be careful claiming that because it's the title of the book it's the "most important quote of the book."
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Feb 22, 2015 22:18
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If you really want to up your self-radicalization and utter contempt for western politics, follow Leopold's Ghost up with Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba and Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. Those two will basically take you through the Belgians pulling out of the Congo and the CIA subsequently arranging for the death of one of the greatest politicians Central Africa has ever seen through to the collapse of the state in the 90s and its decent into the churning hellhole of civil war and economic exploitation that it is now. At that point you will probably just hate humanity, in its entirety, completely on principle. After that go read a Jane Austin novel or pet a puppy or something.
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Mar 5, 2015 18:22
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It should also be mentioned that the Congolese genocide is one of the best examples for pointing out why colonialism sucks and why it's created so many awful problems in the world. It also highlights a ton of ways that globalization and the consumer market for commodities (in Leupold's case, rubber) can indirectly make life really lovely for lots of people out there. Not everyone knows that there's a very real human cost for living in a world where you get to have a supercomputer in your back pocket, and for a lot of people it's a pretty good shock when they realize it. edit: not to start an argument about the good/bad/evil of living in a first world society - it just doesn't hurt for people to know these things before deciding if they need to upgrade their 8 month old cell phone to this year's shiny new model, or any of the other 1001 random examples you could use to make the same point.
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Mar 20, 2015 22:51
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Frankly, if you are a student who wants to learn about Iranian history broadly I wouldn't start with something like a Cambridge History of <country name>. Those things are all inclusive to an absurd degree because they're meant as reference material, a good, vetted volume that can be cited by a historian if they need a footnote for a specific random fact. In this day and age? Just start reading Wikipedia. From a research standpoint and as something you'd want to cite in a paper it has huge problems, but approached from the much lower bar of "I just want to learn about this subject" it's goddamned wonderful. Read all of the Wikipedia poo poo on Iran you can stomach and then chase down specific books cited in it to get your toes into the actual literature on whatever sub-section of Iranian history you find really interests you.
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Apr 22, 2015 15:18
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COOL CORN posted:
This is going to limit you pretty severely.
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May 13, 2015 02:53
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TheFallenEvincar posted:As someone for whom Chinese history is an enormous blindspot, where do I start with all that Three Kingdoms stuff? Should I just read Romance of the Three Kingdoms? I've heard you need to have an existing knowledge of Chinese history to get into that and that it's more of a legendary mythos anyway. Take this with a grain of salt because this is coming from a background of doing a similar project with German history, but I'd flat out start with the mythology. Once you've done that then swing around and pick up some academic works on the very early stages of the civilizations an work forward from there. Having a grip on the mythology/religion makes the rest of it make a hell of a lot more sense. Imagine, for example, trying to make sense out of the late Roman Empire or Merovingian/Carolingian Europe if you didn't know gently caress all about Christianity.
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Jun 30, 2015 16:18
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Glatthaar's writing is really readable and he has a pretty balanced presentation.
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Jul 9, 2015 14:58
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TheFallenEvincar posted:That makes me wonder if there were any good books that cover the Etruscans and Roman Kingdom/pre-republic stuff, I assume a lack of good historical sources/accounts other than mythology prevents this There is plenty of good historical information on the Etruscans, it's just all archaeological. There is tons written about them, but they tend the be the sorts of archaeology-driven books that don't make good reading for the layman.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:52
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Rollofthedice posted:That's a bit unfortunate. Thanks for the recommendations regardless, I'll check them out. You're doing the history equivalent of saying "I want a book about biology, all of it." Any broad history is going to be little more than a narrative textbook. If you're looking to pick up info on that level I'd actually just start with wikipedia. Once you have a grasp on what you're interested in you can pursue books that make more interesting arguments.
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Jul 10, 2015 21:16
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Stravinsky posted:That in Europe the world wars and holocaust shook off aristocratic influence over politics was a big final thing that is patently not true. My main evidence being the EU. It's a little hard to argue that the EU represents a continuation of 19th century aristocratic power. Yes, power is still very much in the hands of privileged elites but that's true in any historical social or governmental system you care to name. The decline of the dominance of a previous ruling class and the development of a new one is a pretty notable thing and worth mentioning in a book on the era.
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Jul 29, 2015 23:44
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"A Vietcong memoir" is the best book on the conflict o have read. It is the memoirs of the highest ranking defector. He came over with the boat people so he covers the entirety of the conflict both with the French and Americans.
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Aug 24, 2015 03:34
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:This is a little bit of a different request, but are there any good print collections of old maps out there? Large coffee table format would obviously be preferable, but I'll take what I can get for now. "how the states got their shapes" might scratch that. It's a bit light but it makes good coffee table reading
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Sep 13, 2015 17:58
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Can you be any more specific about your interests?
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Oct 2, 2015 03:08
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Facing East from Indian Country is a pretty good book. I like it most for the way it lays out the problems inherent in trying to do a history that focuses on the natives and some of the ways to get around it. It does a good job of then taking the information we do have and painting a view of N. American tribes that focuses on them and their interactions with each other rather than on the point of contacts with Europeans. It's also one of the few really readable books I can think of that deals with N. America in that way.
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Mar 8, 2016 21:08
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dublish posted:Not to judge or defend the author's biases (I don't know anything about the guy), but don't publishers get the lion's share of the input on a book's title and cover? My PhD advisor had "hitler" included prominently in the title of a book about the 50s because the publisher had data about books with hitler in the title selling better.
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Apr 11, 2016 18:01
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One of the things we used to do in gradschool while drinking was try to figure out the optimal book title for maximum Borders sales. Usually it was something like "Hitler's Hidden Genocide: Occult Nazi sexual practices and Freemasonry in the Wehrmacht." Basically we would try to cram in 1) Hitler 2) Nazis 3) war crimes 4) Wehrmacht 5) implication that the thing is unknown or undiscovered 6)  Bonus points for squeezing in a popular secret society or the occult. It also works well as a rubric for crafting fake History Channel show titles.
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Apr 11, 2016 19:08
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Half the shelf from which picked up Mao's Great Famine was about Nazis. It's always Nazis. gently caress, read up on some of the ones where the local SS emigrated en mass. Latvia is one I'm particularly familiar with through a friend - both his grandfathers were Latvian SS that ended up in the US - and that literature is rife with people talking about how awful it was that these patriots fighting for their country against communism lost everything and had to move to the US/Britain. The cold-war era stuff is especially egregious in this regard.
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Apr 11, 2016 20:59
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The same could be said of the confederacy and there is no end to their apologists.
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Apr 23, 2016 02:33
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TheFallenEvincar posted:Man that reminds me how horrifying I found the denazification chapters of Postwar by Tony Judt (Great read by the way, I recommend it), cuz yeah, that narrative was pushed into all generations afterwards everywhere but then you're faced with the reality of how shallow and weak denazification really was that nobody taught you in school and you're like jesus. so many high society/professionals who were collaborators or straight up card carrying enthusiastic nazis got to stay and guide the postwar futures of their countries. I guess nazi doctors are better than a scarcity of doctors though? Don't worry, the east hosed it up too. The idea that they were super-good at denazification due to their firmer ideological objections is one of those things that became current when people in the late 60s and early 70s were looking around in W. Germany and realizing how many of the fuckers were still around, and then taking the E. German official line too much at face value. It was a useful tool when protesting about how people who had ordered the execution of deserting kids in April '45 were still on the bench, but it's increasingly apparent that it wasn't as cut and dry as that. There is a lot of scholarship now that shows that while the top-level stuff (judiciary and academia especially) was more thorough than in the west the status of mid-level professionals like doctors and teachers was more or less the same. From Nazisim to Communism: German schoolteachers under two dictatorships by Lansing is a good example of this. He does a really good job of showing just how much continuity there was between teachers in Brandenburg between the Nazi and early Communist eras. What happened was that a lot of people got kicked out in the first, blanket wave of firings but then got re-hired as they were certified to not be nazis. That certification was a pretty rubber-stamp affair since they had a dire teacher shortage, so only the people who were the most implicated didn't get their jobs back. You could be a no bullshit member of the Nazi party and be back in a classroom by 1952, whether you're talking about West or East Germany. To give you an idea, one of the guys I ran across in my own research was fired during the initial de-nazification sweep, rehired a few years later, then fired again when his conduct during the early Nazi era came to light. His problem? He published a ton of really bad poetry celebrating Adolph Hitler as the best thing to ever happen to Germany. Even then he only got that additional scrutiny because he had moved up to the administrative ranks. If he had stayed a classroom teacher no one really would have given a poo poo as long as he didn't start spouting Nazi bullshit in the classroom. One of the things you have to understand about governments dominated by a single political party (other easy examples are most communist governments, the Ba'athists in Iraq, etc) is that some level of interaction and participation with the party quickly becomes a sine qua non for any kind of professional activity and career advancement. In the case of the NSDAP they made party-affiliated professional organizations a flat out requirement. No one who taught in German schools in the early 40s got away without being a member of the state teacher's organization, the NSLB. poo poo like that is why the denazification paperwork had to include an entire category for people who were only incidental participants in the Nazi project. On the upside this gave them a way to actually have something resembling a civil society in Germany after the war, because the alternative was to not let anyone born between 1880 and 1930 do anything at all. The downside was that along with all the people who were no more guilty or innocent than the population as a whole you had a bunch of real assholes who managed to get a clean certification and go on to have successful post-war careers. That said, there are layers where it was scandalous. The people protesting in '68 and mad about the guys in the judiciary had a point, after all.
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Apr 25, 2016 18:27
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Brodeurs Nanny posted:What's a good read on US history post-WW2 through the 70's? Emphasis on the 60's/JFK if possible and obviously free of US bias. Just focus on the big themes general outline of events and the authors argument. You're never going to remember the details. Names and dates are trivia that you can look up. Edit : think of it this way. Even if you can't remember as important a name as "Hitler" you're still good to go if you can talk broadly about his policies and their impact.
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May 26, 2016 16:06
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Peukert's The Weimar Republic: Crisis of Classical Modernity is a really good place to start and an adequate single volume if you're only going to read one. It's well written only about 350 pages and assigned in a ton of classes so cheap copies are readily available.
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Jun 2, 2016 15:59
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A human heart posted:ah hell, i can't learn about a subject because there isn't a person on itunes reading the book out loud to me. i also need someone to change my soiled diaper Slow your roll chief. I too would ideally love it if everyone took a few hours a day to read books but poo poo isn't always ideal. Personally I'd rather someone indulge their curiosity about history via an audio book than be put off it entirely by stodgy purists. Not all of us can, or want to be, dorky professional academics.
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Jun 13, 2016 17:49
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Reading "The emperor of all maladies: a biography of cancer" right now. Pretty good. A+ beach reading. Will make you double up on sun screen.
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Jun 27, 2016 19:01
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smr posted:Can't be, as the source material for that mostly doesn't exist. It is a hurdle bit not an insurmountable one. Check out "facing east from Indian country" for a good discussion of how you handle that kind of history, plus a neat take con colonial America from the Indian pov.
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Jul 31, 2016 16:03
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Eddy Rickenbacker's autobiography is also really readable if you're looking for color. All the standard caveats about autobios written in the 20s apply but it holds up pretty well.
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Nov 24, 2016 16:34
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Eh, I re-read Salt on a vacation a couple years back and I wasn't super impressed. Don't get me wrong, it's good beach reading. He does a good job of describing stuff. I've got a pretty vivid memory of his description of Chinese salt monopolies and production methods, and I re-read it a while ago. What kind of got me is he doesn't seem to have much of an argument. Just "here's this really important thing we use all the time, now let me tell you how people produced it over the last 2000 years."
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Jan 19, 2017 21:23
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My go-to recommendation for understanding the ideological underpinnings of fascism (which is a really major part of understanding its rise) is the aptly titled Fascism: A Very Short Introduction. It's a really well written book that does a really good job of laying out what the gently caress fascism actually is, what its ideological roots are, and how the various manifestations were different from each other while still being able to be categorized under the same broad heading. It has the added bonus of being succinct enough that you can get through it in a few hours, although it's one of those books where re-reading it really helps nail down the details.
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Jan 24, 2017 16:14
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Jedi425 posted:Hey history goons, want to get madly depressed for just $2? Boy, does Amazon have the deal for you today! ooh, thanks. I've been meaning to get my own copy of that since forever.
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May 6, 2017 20:51
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If you don't mind a scholarly edited volume Dictatorship as Experience: towards a socio-cultural history of the GDR edited by Konrad h jarausch is a really solid starting point for wrapping your head around its many facets. It's too easy to just talk about it as either repressive dystopia or workers paradise, and the contributors do a good job of showing a really balanced picture that tries to make sense of it as part of the larger history of Germany. Edit: it's also a great kicking off point for further reading as most of the contributors have written a lot more in other places.
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May 22, 2017 06:20
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Oh , and Naimark. the russians in germany:a history of the soviet zone of occupation is great for dealing with the period from 45 to 49. It's just the early years but he does a great job of showing how e Germany transitioned from the nazis to the ddr.
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May 22, 2017 06:26
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