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This is probably a long shot, but anyone know any good books on/ that include Siberian shamanism? Failing that, Mongolian or Central Asian?the_homemaster posted:So I'm going to Tulsa, New York and Boston. It's already been recommended to death but I just finished 1491 and found it as interesting and informative as everyone else seems to.
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Aug 16, 2016 21:38
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Are there general history books on premodern India/ South Asia and Indochina that people would recommend? I'm realizing I don't even have the broad strokes down for those regions and I'd like to amend that.
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Feb 25, 2017 21:30
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Depends on your level of interest a bit, but I'd recommend A Consice History of Modern Korea by Michael J Seth. It's not just on North Korea but it goes into reasonable detail, and in my opinion it's important to get a broader perspective both on the lead-up to the situation since the partition and to see South Korea's development in parallel. Incidentally if anyone is looking for a book on Korean history in general I'd strongly recommend his full one (I haven't actually read the Modern history book, but from my understanding it's basically the back half of this)- it's pretty comprehensive and goes over the contentious stuff (of which there is a hell of a lot in Korean history) in probably the most balanced and objective way I've found.
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Jul 13, 2017 21:33
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SubG posted:In 1997 Foote said that if the Civil War was fought today he'd fight for the Confederacy: my hot take is that all scholarship done before 1980 is bad e: whoops I thought this was the Military History thread but the point stands
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Feb 2, 2021 22:07
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You're assuming a more thorough justification than the "wow people were still saying this in the 1970s?" reaction I get from time to time, but if I have to justify my needlessly sweeping statement, I'm gonna ascribe it to postmodernism having taken hold of the mainstream by around that point. Also purely coincidentally it's the time that my interest, Korean studies, became an actual thing.
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Feb 2, 2021 22:20
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I've never actually read it, but in terms of a general survey East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History has been on my radar for a while. It's an undergrad textbook but for such a broad topic I'm not sure that's a bad thing, and while I don't know the other authors, James Palais was basically the preeminent western language historian of Korean history before his passing. You might also look at Charles Holcombe's A History of East Asia: From the Origins of Civilization to the 21st Century; I haven't read this, but I've read his The Genesis of East Asia (covering up to the end of the first millennium) which was fine and he's a generally well regarded historian, so I imagine this will be too. More narrowly focused on the philosophical bend to your question, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History is basically about that transition from the perspective of the Confucian bureaucracies, which might be of interest. Tracing cultural trends back to premodern East Asia is gonna be kind of haphazard though; the sad reality is that they were pretty heavily broken by colonialism/modernization, or distorted in other ways in e.g. Japan.
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Mar 8, 2021 03:47
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Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands. It's like 20 years old now but the author happened to bark up the right tree on most of what he talks about, so while things have been elaborated on in the meantime none of what he says is fundamentally wrong in the same way it is for some other books on Japan from that era. The first 30% or so of Gina Barnes' (2015 edition of) The Rise of Civilization in China, Korea, and Japan also covers what you want, and is also very good and much more up to date.
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Apr 15, 2021 18:11
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Moreau posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for a broad history of Mongolia, prior to the appearance of Mr Khan? I only read the sections on ancient history so I'm not sure how far it directly covers the groups that would become the Mongols, but The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia is about the broad region's pre-Mongol Empire history. It's archaeology heavy but that's going to be inevitable for anything pre-Genghis. Conversely if ancient stuff is actually your jam, I'd heartily recommend Ancient China and its Enemies, which goes pretty comprehensively over the formation of a lot of the steppe/sinic cultural divides that would go on to define most of the histories of the two regions for most of their history. Worth noting there's also a 2-part Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire out this July that I imagine will be a lot closer to what you're looking for (it'll doubtless have a bunch on pre-Genghisid stuff); their recent volumes make a conscious effort to pay attention to social/gender histories even where evidence is thin in a way they did not back in the 1990s. Koramei fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Feb 22, 2023 |
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Feb 22, 2023 17:21
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Can someone recommend a single volume about Japan? Doesn't have to cover everything, just an interesting survey. I really like William Wayne Farris' Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History. It's (as the title betrays) a kinda demographically-centered history as opposed to a political one, going into (relative) depth on the technology, institutions and customs that made up the fabric of society over a sequence of eras he divides the history into. He's one of the foremost scholars on Japan's population history, so that has kind of a central place -- and so he dwells a lot on subjects like disease and immigration. But that also means you get a much more in depth treatment of Japan's interactions with the continent than most histories of Japan give you. It is much more lacking on the political side of stuff, although that's not completely absent. Next to no treatment of battles though as I recall. There's also an iirc pretty good edited volume, Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850, e. Karl Friday. I have to admit though going back to what Cyrano said recently (here? I think) about audiobooks being poo poo, I went through it during my short-lived phase of blazing through books via the robot text to speech, so now 4 years later my memories of it are kind of a blur. It's obviously much more comprehensive than Farris' work and will get you a diversity of opinions; my recollection is some of the authors were pretty dry though whereas Farris is imo a pretty good writer. That could be entirely because I was listening to a robot though. I would probably recommend both. In general for Japan though I'd strongly recommend looking for stuff from the late 90s onward. My interest is Korea so my feelings on this are probably sharper than most, but Japanese history traditionally got treated as a much more discrete thing* than it should have, and that's only relatively recently been getting corrected. * Incidentally, this often gets called up because of Japanese racial exceptionalism etc but I read an interesting take recently in Torquil Duthie's Man'yoshu and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan that Japanese scholarly insularism is actually a postwar correction against Imperial Japan's brand of mutliculturalism. Imperial Japanese scholars were very open to making connections between Japan's history and the continent, just...far too often as an explicit tool for empire building. Postwar scholars were shy about this, and maybe overcorrected. Koramei fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Sep 23, 2023 |
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Sep 23, 2023 21:06
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Anyone read Lieberman's Strange Parallels? It's a 2 part series with the first focusing purely on Southeast Asia (then author is a S.E. Asia specialist) and then the second being basically a global history 'of the periphery' to act as comparison. I'm wondering how necessary it is to read the first if I'm mostly interested in the second? It's apparently one of the best done broad comparative history books out there which I'm always down for. Speaking of, after putting it down for like a year I finally finished John Darwin's After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000, which is another comparative history focusing on major Eurasian empires, addressing them region by region. I thought it was pretty good, but a lot better in the second half when he starts to focus on European imperialism which is clearly his specialty (he's a historian of the 20th century Briitish Empire). Lieberman's work is by all accounts uncannily well researched for each of the regions he highlights and offers a bit of a different perspective which I'm kind of excited about. Apparently very convincing arguments to support a 'late-great divergence' idea -- that a lot of things we commonly cite as European exceptionalism had parallels throughout Eurasia -- which I'm keen to take in since to be honest I've been finding myself drifting to be more at the opposite stance than I used to be. If anyone has recommendations for other non-pop-history grand comparative histories I'm all ears. I know they naturally run into the issue that it's impossible to be an expert in everything, but having spent the past decade as a hobbyist nose deep in East Asian studies the insularism of so much nationally focused history has been grinding my gears to no end. Koramei fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Feb 2, 2024 |
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Feb 2, 2024 11:28
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Anyone have recommendations for something on the formation of complex societies / transition from hunter gatherers to agriculture, maybe touching on state formation but not focusing on it.
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Apr 23, 2024 06:39
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:48 |
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Anyone have recommended readings that cover the whole sweep of prehistoric human migrations in an overarching way? I started on Against the Grain based on recommendations here about state formation (thanks everyone) but then decided I wanted to go even earlier. My understanding is genetic evidence has advanced light years just in the past decade and it'd be cool to get an up to date reading of the topic to ground with first. I've been reading David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here, which is pretty close to what I want (although 6 years old now-- my impression is there's been some staggering advances just within that timeframe, so if there is anything even newer that would be great), but delving into the background it looks like he's taken some heat from anthropologists as being way too narrowly studied in genetics to be drawing some conclusions in social sciences he draws (about racial genetic differences particularly) and since my interest is more from an anthropological/archaeological perspective anyway I'd kind of prefer to read a book from that side of the aisle if there's a recommended one.
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May 9, 2024 06:12
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