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Burning Rain posted:Is there any reason why rural history seems to be neglected by (popular?) historians? Is it lack of interest? Lack of available data? It just seems strange that the 90% (just a guess) of people who have lived outside of towns and cities throughout history now exist only as a footnote to the "real" history. And to add to what Stravinsky said, I think there's a decent argument to be made that life for rural farmers didn't really change a whole lot between, to pick completely arbitrary dates, 3000BC and 1600AD. Certainly tons of interesting stuff happened in those times, polities rose and fell, and religions came and went. But a whole lot of the story would seem to be 'be a subsistence farmer, try not to get all your surpluses taken by your political masters, pray that you and your sons don't die in the army, and hope that another army (friendly or hostile, doesn't much matter) doesn't happen to march past your farm, take all your stuff and kill you and your family.' That aside, I've almost finished Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West. Basically a textbook, but good lord is it ever fascinating. Best look I've ever had at how the Roman political class operated, and a far more plausible explanation of the end of Rome In The West. I had to make notes along the way to keep track of the personalities of the period though, since I wasn't overly familiar with it before I started reading. I particularly liked the line at the end of a chapter to the effect of: It would not be correct to say that the Roman Empire was killed or assassinated. Instead, it accidentally committed suicide. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Mar 11, 2013 |
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Mar 11, 2013 18:12
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Railing Kill posted:Anyone have good suggestions for books about the Thirty Years War? Thanks in advance, goons! There's literally dozens of them all called The Thirty Years War. I think the most modern/up-to-date/respectable version would be Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy. It's long, but it's great.
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Apr 22, 2013 19:17
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My intro was A History of Russia by Riasonovsky, just because my Mom had it lying around from her days in school. Was an exhaustive book, covering from before the Kievan Rus up to around the rise of Khrushchev I think, as that's when it was written. I'm given to understand that there are newer revisions that have been updated to include everything up to the post-Soviet present, but I'm still oddly proud of my old copy.
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May 16, 2013 18:19
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Also, not really what you're looking for, but it's a book I really like so I'll plug it anyway. http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0802119751 About a journalist who sneaks into Liberia during the civil war to see what exactly what happening. The rebel forces took him in on their supply lines, and took him to see the front lines. The title refers to the mercenary, formerly a South African special forces member, who acts as his bodyguard, and later gets into a wee bit of legal trouble. The vast majority of the book is the adventure into Liberia though.
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Jun 13, 2013 00:48
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Yeah, the Wehrmacht pulled off some crazy poo poo during the war. Germany (almost accidentally really) was pretty much the only combatant that correctly guessed how armoured warfare was going to work. The Soviets came to about the same conclusions in their tangles with the Japanese, but hadn't had time to act on any of that experience before the war broke out. Incidentally I don't really know how they did it either, beyond a wikipedia based understanding of maneouvre warfare.
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Jun 22, 2013 07:39
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Indeed, the German blitzkrieg was a specific implementation of maneouvre warfare, which we know works. The panzer divisions weren't wizards, but they were using a rather successful stratagem.
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Jun 30, 2013 07:40
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Just get a copy of Riasanovsky's A History of Russia and be done with it.
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Aug 22, 2013 23:39
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So I'm becoming more and more curious about European colonization efforts in the Americas and beyond. Can anyone recommend some good sources - since I'd kind of like academic level histories, I assume I'm going to need different ones for different regions and parent governments.
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Sep 17, 2013 03:22
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nessin posted:1) Military history of the late Roman Empire through the Carolingian period. I can find lots of high level material, but I've never found a good study on the details of why Romans were forced to playing barbarians against each other rather than actually fighting them or how Charlemagne and his successors could have pacified the Saxons but couldn't kick out Vikings that settled in winter quarters. Just trying to find any more detail about how various military events or situations came to pass/exist, rather than just someone just saying this was just how things were. Look at Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire, or better still, Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West. I've only read Barbarian Migrations myself; a number of people here speak highly of Heather's work, although Halsall seems to disagree with Heather's interpretation of events in a lot of places and it shows in the footnotes of his book. Personally I loved reading it. Neither covers as far as Charlemagne, but both cover the collapse of Rome in the West, and Halsall covers quite well the establishment of the Frankish Kingdom, including their destruction and absorption of the Kingdom of the Burgundians. The gist of it is that failure to properly play the barbarians off against each other was what got them into the crisis that ended Rome in the West in the first place. Where a Roman army did show up, it tended to run amok over whatever army the 'barbarians' (in quotes because they were essentially Roman anyway) could muster. But the Empire could never afford to keep the troops around, because they had other poo poo to deal with. So you won't find any detailed accounts of distinctly Roman armies fighting distinctly Barbarian invaders, because that never happened. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 09:31
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Seconding Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, but it is basically a text book, so it's fairly dry, and rather expensive. I absolutely loved reading it though.HighClassSwankyTime posted:Is it ghoulish to suggest the abridged version of Gibbin's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Yes. It's an interesting work due to it's own cultural context, but it's also 200 years out of date, and it shows. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Feb 1, 2014 |
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Feb 1, 2014 19:49
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Spills the Moon posted:And finally, are there any good books about Manchuria? In just about every book of East Asian history I've read, whenever the names Khitan or Jurchen or whatever pop up, they tend to be treated as nothing more than problematic border peoples that cause trouble for the Chinese and the Koreans from time to time and not much else. "King/Emperor so-and-so strengthened his reign by expanding the border into Jurchen territories." The book that immediately comes to mind is China Marches West, which seems to have a rather good reputation for it's content, although I'm finding it fantastically boring. While it does cover the late Ming period and the Manchu's rise to forming the Qing dynasty, it doesn't cover the earlier stuff, and is primarily about the Qing push into Central Eurasia.
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Feb 26, 2014 23:13
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Spills the Moon posted:Cool, thanks! That sounds like it could be interesting. Have you, or anyone else read The Manchu Way I'm also thinking of picking that one up, but at the moment I'm hesitating. I have not.
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Mar 4, 2014 22:09
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Endman posted:Just ordered myself a copy of this: Iron Kingdom was excellent indeed, I shall have to pick this up.
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Mar 17, 2014 21:06
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Count Roland posted:Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Furguson[/b]. While interesting in its scope, it really pissed me off. Colonialism in Africa wasn't that bad because it brought new medical technology. Revolutionaries the world over just want rock music and blue jeans. It spends a lot of time on tangents, with the chapter on medicine in particular being not about medicine at all. I think most people here would hate it. That's because Niall Furguson is renowned for being a general shithead who reminisces about the days of The Empire.
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Apr 26, 2014 05:27
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And then there is the greater picture that involves the earlier renaissances of the 12th Century, and likely another one during the time of Charlemagne, and probably more I'm not aware of.
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May 3, 2014 18:14
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What sort of thing are you looking for for space history? Apollo by Catherine Bly Cox and Charles Murray is the best book on that particular program, general histories are harder to come by. The astronauts of course have released biographies galore.
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Nov 12, 2014 02:56
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Stravinsky posted:Let me also say that for probably 99% of the people who post in this thread that reading something like The Cambridge History of Iran will probably do zero for them, because it is one hundred percent no joke legit academic history that will bore most people to death. I am talking about soil and mineral makeup of the land that go on for many pages. It depends on the book though. Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West is straight up an academic textbook, but it's also amazing.
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Apr 22, 2015 06:49
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FMguru posted:McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. Arguably the best single-volume history of anything. Seconding this. Battle Cry is amazing, and largely avoids narratives on all the battles, which makes it flow a lot better.
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Jul 10, 2015 04:32
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Although that narrative is certainly not without it's critics. I much prefer Guy Halsall's Barbarian Migrations, which asserts that it's not that the barbarians eventually outsmarted the Romans, but instead that they had been closely related to it for centuries, and it was weakening Roman authority that brought them in the first place, often by invitation. The 'barbarians' weren't trying to destroy the Empire, they were just trying to carve themselves a powerful spot within it, and were going out of their way to be as Roman as possible. But a century of internecine conflict, giving rise to regional power blocks, proved so damaging to central authority that the whole empire never got put back together. It's academic as gently caress (it's basically a textbook), but that probably shouldn't bother you in this case. Lots of talk about archaeological evidence and ethnogenesis.
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Jul 13, 2015 21:22
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fishmech posted:Howard Zinn himself once said that what he did with People's History was nowhere near the best, it was just one of the first and other people had done it better than him by the 1990s. The People's History has a lot of inaccuracies and misinterpretations, and it's all down to the fact that he was kinda pioneering the field, and there's been like over 40 years of better research done. Huh, so he's like the Edward Gibbon of American history.
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Dec 19, 2015 10:34
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I quite enjoyed Madness, Betrayal, and the Lash, a tale of George Vancouver's efforts to survey the coastline of the Pacific Northwest. A bit niche, but there's a lot of drama around the voyage, despite him running it rather competently.
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Jan 4, 2016 19:25
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HEY GUNS posted:Ferdinand II is the one who was so freaking catholic he started the war up again after he had won it. I think I've seen you post something about this before, but can you expand a little?
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Feb 19, 2019 21:39
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Hannibal Rex posted:Your initial excitement for 1421 reminds me of a friend who's really into some Atlantis theory about some supposedly dried up lake or inland sea in the Sahara; is there a decent book about debunking/tracing the modern origins of various Atlantis theories, or the historical reception of Plato's dialogues? The Atlantis stuff is obviously nonsense (and we've had a few Atlantis believers in the history threads over the years), but the wetter Sahara thing is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period 
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Jun 11, 2019 18:08
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Grand Fromage posted:You should throw Dark Sun in there, Rhodes' book about the hydrogen bomb. I think it's a better book beyond just being the second part of the story. Seconding this.
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Jul 29, 2019 05:32
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Anybody have recommendations for the Russian region during the decline of Mongol authority, the emergence of Lithuania, and then the eventual ascendancy of Muscovy? Roughly 1300-1600.
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Aug 1, 2019 23:45
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vyelkin posted:
Yeah I'm primarily looking for earlier events, but this sounds very interesting, just how the Muscovite state integrated all that land is fascinating, and I imagine it's a reflection of the earlier period. quote:Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia by Valerie Kivelson. This is just a phenomenal, beautiful book about how Muscovy and Muscovites understood, interpreted, and used space, built around an amazing sourcebase Kivelson found of hundreds of old maps, many of which are reproduced in colour within the book. It's gorgeous, her analysis is great, and it's been extremely influential in Russian history over the last decade. You had me at "hundreds of old maps"
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Aug 2, 2019 01:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Eh, on the other hand I don't know that it's fair to say the soviet citizens "chose" to continue resisting rather than surrender. The poo poo at play is a bit different in democracies and . . . however you choose to describe the Soviet system. Although the prospects of surrender are markedly different in the case of London vs Leningrad too I would point out, at least with the benefit of hindsight. How aware were the Russian populace of how badly Slavs were being treated in the occupied territories? I would think the Soviet propaganda machine would have taken steps to make it extremely well known.
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Dec 27, 2019 09:03
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I'll recommend Facing East From Indian Country , with the caveat that it is about European-Indigenous interactions across Eastern North America including the Iroquois, but it does not have a particular focus on the Iroquois.
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Jan 2, 2020 07:04
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OctaMurk posted:They discounted the possibility entirely, because Korea "isnt tank country", iirc That was probably peak "why do we need a conventional military we have all these nukes" too.
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Jan 21, 2020 18:20
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Anybody have any good recommendations on Vietnam after the Second Indochina War?
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Jan 26, 2020 20:26
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Anyone have good English language recommendations about the political history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania? Particularly the early centuries, from the initial consolidation and expansion in the 13th century, up to the Union of Lublin?
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May 24, 2020 00:23
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Pick posted:Hello, history book thread. Currently, monarchism has become a popular political stance in the doomsday economics thread. But I don't agree with the monarchy or the divine right of kings and I would like it to not be re-instituted. Can anyone give me some good recommendations for books that cover particularly bad monarchs, so that I can approach their perspective from a more informed place? Check out something on the latter stages of the Hundred Years War if you want some interesting, accessible monarch stories. The French side has Charles the VI, who inherits the throne at age 11, has all of his uncles financially ruin the Kingdom during their regency, then develops recurring bouts of mental illnesses, during the first of which his various relatives kick off a full blown civil war over control of the government. On the English side you have a highly effective and centralized monarchy, that upon the accession of Henry VI finds itself with a king 9 months old. Without an effective monarch at the helm, the government slowly began eating itself, and by the time he's in his thirties (and also suffering various sorts of mental illness) England descends into - you guessed it - full blown civil war over control of the government.
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May 28, 2020 01:25
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Grand Fromage posted:Monarchs, famous for never being power-hungry backstabbing sociopaths. Hello, my name is Ivan Grozny. I believe you have a letter for me.
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May 28, 2020 05:21
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Fighting Trousers posted:Tell them to read Common Sense. Thomas Paine does a pretty good job obliterating the idea of heredity monarchy. Thomas Paine: All Men Are Created Equal, therefore... 21st century chuds: whoa whoa whoa slow down
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May 28, 2020 16:32
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I am not the OP but I will repeat my oft asked and perhaps unanswerable request for English language histories on what's going down in the lands of the former Kievan Rus', from around when the Mongols show up, up to say Ivan the Great. Which is not exclusively Russian history of course but still.
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Jun 4, 2020 18:15
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vyelkin posted:I can only repeat my suggestions from last time: Oh yeah, that was def's not me bashing your suggestions, I'm working my way through Elusive Empire right now and it is awesome.
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Jun 4, 2020 19:37
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geegee posted:Way back in the day we used Riasonovsky's A History of Russia (now authored by Steinberg since R's death) and so far as I can see it's still the state of the art, single-volume history of Russia from Kievan Rus to Putin(?- Latest publication date shows as 2018 on Amazon). Anyway, given your request I'm surprised no one else has mentioned it - maybe it's an issue of cost (f'ing pricy). Yeah this is my go-to Russia book actually, I have an ancient copy from when my mom was in Uni. If you want an overall survey this is an excellent choice.
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Jun 6, 2020 07:40
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1491 is the usual recommendation, as the broad survey; the Americas are a big place. It's very good, as is the sequel1493 about the effects of the Colombian exchange. I quite enjoyed Facing East from Indian Country, but it's very focused on what is the modern USA. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 20:46
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I don't think Mann's thesis was that native societies were particularly moral or superior compared to European ones. Merely that they existed and were large and sophisticated. And that Tenochtitlan was extremely populous I guess. I'd agree that it is super revisionist, but given the popular conception of pre-Colombian America, it should be.
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Jun 19, 2020 03:31
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SubG posted:Other reading on the subject: I know I shouldn't be surprised but jfc that is the most childish/royal poo poo.
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Jul 6, 2020 18:07
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