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I recently finished Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding by Dorothy Ko, and it is one of the most interesting books I've read in quite a while. Ko is both a good writer and a good historian, and it really shows. She does an excellent job integrating primary sources into her narrative and analysis and also finding voices (especially women's voices!) that hadn't been used before. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Chinese history, women's and gender history, or the social construction of beauty.
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Feb 2, 2012 00:53
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baw posted:This is also a great read, and if you're interested in studying the Third Reich, your first stop should be Richard Evans' definitive trilogy (the last volume of which came out in 2009,) and then you can branch out into other aspects that interest you. There are a lot of new histories of the Third Reich and World War II in general, so right now is an awesome time to start reading about it. Seconding this recommendation of Evans' trilogy. Bendersky's A Concise History of Nazi Germany is also a good place to start. If you're (or anyone else is) looking for more specific recommendations for social history-type works, feel free to ask me in-thread or shoot me a PM. I'm a historian and this is a field where I've done a lot of work, so I can recommend a lot of titles and authors.
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Feb 3, 2012 20:48
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Decius posted:...reforming the unsustainable and nearly bankrupt British Mint and with it the whole way money making and especially counterfeit protection worked until then. If you're interested in the history of counterfeiting, copyright, intellectual property, and piracy, I'd recommend Adrian Johns' Piracy. It's long, dense, and occasionally dry... but also extremely comprehensive and well-researched. I read most of it for a historiography seminar last semester, and learned a ton about the history of printing, books, pharmaceuticals, and so much more.
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Feb 7, 2012 20:32
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And after you've read that, do yourself a huge favor and read E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. It is easily one of the best works of social history I have ever read.
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Feb 10, 2012 00:47
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geegee posted:Sorry to be so late to post on this. Is Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich no longer the first source for these questions? At least for most historians, it's basically never been the first source for these questions.
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Mar 22, 2012 19:41
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Alhazred posted:Read the Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. Fanon worked as a psychiatric during the war and treated Algerians who had been tortured by the French. The book is about how violence is necessary for a people to fight it's oppressors it also talks about how violence affects people and uses his patients as examples. Fanon is a really, really intense read. I'm reading it now for some work I'm doing on the German New Left, and it's the kind of book that drains you while you're reading it a lot of the time. But, yeah, it's really interesting, and one of the foundational works for discourse about colonialism.
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Apr 25, 2012 01:52
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Tupping Liberty posted:I am going to be teaching US history 1860s-Modern day, for the first time, next year (11th graders). I really want to teach it from the essential question, "what does it mean to be American, and how does that change?". I especially want to focus on cultural - even pop-cultural things like movies, music, art, theatre, dance, etc. I don't have any specific recommendations for books right now (I'll look over my books when I get home from work, but they're all packed up in preparation for a move, so not as easy as usual), but I would recommend making the class pretty primary source heavy. My younger sister (around the same age as your students) just finished up an integrated US History/American Lit class and the parts she talked about liking most were often reading primary sources. Newspaper articles, diaries, stuff that was popular at the time. I'm not sure how widely digitized/easily available this would be, but it would be awesome to read stuff aimed at teenagers from each period you're studying -- magazines for young people, excerpts from textbooks they used, et cetera. A book that I'd recommend especially to teachers of American history in general is History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History. This may or may not end up being useful for your class, but it's a really interesting read. Edit: A really cool project would be to have them talk to people of various ages about what being a young person was like when they were alive. Obviously the earliest you'll be able to get would be someone who was a teenager in the 1920s, but it could still be a really neat assignment for them. nerdpony fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jul 6, 2012 |
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Jul 6, 2012 15:10
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Alhazred posted:There's also The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. Seconding this book. I had it as a textbook in a 400-level medieval history course and it was great. We read it in tandem with a more traditional history of the Crusades, which was a great way to use both of them. Can't remember which at the moment and I'm not sure if I still have the book, but if I find it in the near future I'll edit this post.
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Jan 14, 2013 02:55
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