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Just finished the Richard Evans’ Third Reich trilogy. You probably know about it because you’re in the history book thread, but anyway. It is a major work and maybe the best comprehensive look into Nazi Germany if you’re not a history scholar. The first book deals with how the Nazis came into power. The second one covers the 1933-1939 period with a really detailed exploration of nazification of the German society in every sector, from culture through industry to academia. The third part, probably my favorite, deals with the war. Of the many realizations I’ve had during the reading of this mammoth trilogy, the one that really stuck out was how easy it was to completely nazify almost the entire medical profession. Doctors and nurses were super eager to “euthanize” the undesirables, starting with the mental patients very early in the thirties and continuing with the Jews, Roma and others. I also realized that there were very few innocents amongst the German population since atrocities against Jews and others were very well and widely known by 1942 at the latest due to soldiers returning from the front etc but the majority kind of shrugged it off or even supported the thesis on the need for the preventive elimination of the Jewish race. Another good thing the trilogy does is dispel the myth of the purity of Wehrmacht, showing how the regular army took part in abhorrent atrocities, which surely is refreshing in today’s revisionist times. A strong recommendation from me, go read it goons.
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Nov 13, 2019 13:07
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A human heart posted:It's chill that basically all mainstream soviet historians are hopelessly compromised by this sort of thing. Applebaum’s Iron Curtain seems well researched and relies on a lot of primary research, at least seems like it to me. It shows different approaches taken in the introduction of Socialism as a political system in different countries of Eastern Europe. You don’t have to agree with the moral condemnation the author issues against Socialism, but the overview is detailed and interesting. Of course, Applebaum herself is a caricature of a neoliberal, but whatevs. The one historian that fascinates me is Figes, who is obviously approaching history from a liberal position, but then devotes most of his history of the Russian revolutions to arguments why Romanovs had it coming.
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Nov 13, 2019 14:00
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Minenfeld! posted:I still like "A People's Tragedy" because it's well written. But yeah, it's certainly not the only book I have on the revolution. Same here
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Nov 13, 2019 16:56
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Boatswain posted:Gaddis' Cold War isn't very good. Read Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History instead. Thanks for this rec, got it yesterday and immediately got sucked in. The writing is really good
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Nov 15, 2019 11:38
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Dapper_Swindler posted:from reading his vietnam one. he basicaly paints it as war of indipendence that became a brutal civil war that america stupidly stuck its dick into and that pretty much everyone did horrible poo poo to civilians and that when the war was over alot of the NVA soldiers felt hosed over because the government didnt give two fucks about most of them. That’s a very hosed up reading of the Vietnam war. There wouldn’t have been a civil war hadn’t the colonial powers created an opposition to the liberation movement. Even most American historians agree on that. Seems like a big attempt to justify atrocities committed by the colonial powers (US and France).
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Dec 27, 2019 09:39
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Dapper_Swindler posted:whats some good books on the balkan wars of the 1990s. Two of the books I would gladly recommend both take the approach of starting at a point much earlier in history and moving onwards to the nineties. They are Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts and Misha Glenny’s The Balkans. They are not nearly as good as some of the classic books about other conflicts, but they are probably the best I was able to find. If you want a more Croatian-centric approach, Marcus Tanner’s Croatia: A Nation Forged in War is a cool little book. I can vouch for its accuracy, having lived through the events described in it. The Death of Yugoslavia, compiled to accompany the acclaimed (and excellent) BBC TV documentary series could be worth checking out, too. The TV show is brilliant, I haven’t read the book though. I would gladly read anything better others might suggest.
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Mar 28, 2020 21:54
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Tolstoy wrote a pretty cool little book called Sketches from Sevastopol, based on his experience of the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War
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Apr 8, 2020 16:44
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I really enjoyed the mundanity of the “Life in a Medieval...” series written by the Gies’. I would like to know this thread’s opinion on whether they were based on good research. I would also like recommendations for similar looks into the mundane lives of people living in distant historical periods.
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Apr 21, 2020 14:46
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big dyke energy posted:Ruth Goodman's books are marvelous for this. How to be a Tudor, How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan/Renaissance England, How to be a Victorian. There's also Tudor Monastery Farm, which I haven't read but seems to be a companion book of the BBC series she worked on (...Tudor Monastery Farm). Yes, thank you, that’s what I’m looking for.
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May 2, 2020 21:09
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Genghis is canceled
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Aug 31, 2020 10:07
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A readable overview of the Thirty Years War? It can be long, as long as it is not dry.
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Sep 1, 2020 10:35
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Thanks, I’m getting Wilson as the starting point e: no I'm not, the Kindle edition is not available and Amazon wants $81 for shipping, gently caress that e2: It's actually available under the title Europe's Tragedy, yay Take the plunge! Okay! fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Sep 1, 2020 |
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Sep 1, 2020 14:36
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bowser posted:What are some good books on the peopling of [various regions of] the world? I realize early Homo sapien migration would fall into pre-history but I'm hoping you folks can help! After the Ice by Steven Mithen deals with some of these migrations, as well as other aspects of pre-history, and is a delightful read with tons of good pictures. IIRC it has a ton of fans on these forums, counting myself as one.
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Apr 15, 2021 08:13
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Ughh Figes is a straight up piece of poo poo who falsified sources to make Stalin look bad  , used sock puppets to disparage his academic rivals on Twitter and in Amazon reviews, then lied about it when caught red handed, trying to blame his wife. Not to mention his cringeworthy cultural history of Russia, which is a whole other can of worms.Dick Pipes is probably worse, but has a cool name though.
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May 1, 2021 16:48
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Being a cowboy was a hard and lovely job, so surprise, a disproportionately high number of them were black. Not that they haven’t been erased in pretty much all media appearing afterwards.
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May 12, 2021 15:49
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grassy gnoll posted:Did Figes ever recover from exploding his divorce out in public and the review sockpuppet thing? I liked People's Tragedy and it'd be nice to be able to recommend it to folks again. Short answer, no. But People’s Tragedy is still an amazingly readable history of the Russian revolutions. Crimea is pretty solid, even though some sources are dubious. The Whisperers contains outright fabrications, so you should probably avoid that one. He was also right about Putin, so there’s that.
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Apr 5, 2022 17:53
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quote:And lastly there’s Orlando Figes, described by the Guardian as a prominent British historian at the University of London. Figes used the sockpuppets “orlando-birkbeck “ and “historian” to trash some of his rivals on Amazon. (Who knew academics were so viciously competitive?) And he wasn’t beyond posting a review that put in a good word or two for his own work, such as “a fascinating book…leaves the reader awed, humbled, and yet uplifted.”
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Apr 6, 2022 07:11
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sbaldrick posted:Does anyone know of any good books about the various coups/counter-coups and general political of post-imperial African states. I recommend Kapuscinski’s The Emperor. It deals with the fall of Haile Selassie and it’s just an amazing read. He was lucky to be there fairly soon after the events described in the book and talk to relevant sources. His Angolan War book, Another Day of Life, is also very good.
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Aug 8, 2022 09:17
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FPyat posted:Incredibly chilling stuff. The mind has no trouble dancing around any moral implications or consequences that might be inconvenient. The entire Evans’ trilogy is a huge condemnation of the ordinary German
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Mar 29, 2023 07:02
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Digital Jedi posted:I just watched The Peacemaker again. First of all, I second the BBC documentary recommendation, they represent the best overview I am aware of. The Glenny book is decent enough. However, I am of the opinion that those two should absolutely be followed by Gagnon’s The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. The Yugoslav War is very much part of my lived experience and I have always been an obsessive consumer of media, who also studied pol-sci later. Nobody came even close to articulating what the war was really about from my perspective compared to Gagnon. Absolutely devastating read for me as a person who had to go through much of that crap, but so spot on and worth a read.
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Aug 27, 2023 19:49
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The Crimean War was also the first war with telegraphic dispatches keeping the public at home informed on the events on a daily basis. This led to a lot of public pressure on the military and government, but also to the introduction of censorship. It was also one of the first photographed wars and a test bed for many technologies to be used in the Civil War and onwards.
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Feb 17, 2024 15:49
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