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MonsieurChoc posted:My college library routinely leaves piles of books they give out, and I snagged myself a free copy of And the band played on... that I still haven't read. Any opinions on it before I start? Is it good/bad/somewhere in between? I've read that some important parts of its interpretation, including its grasp on epidemiology from a scientific point of view, have been questioned by many academics. Still probably worth reading.
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Feb 9, 2015 19:00
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a_young_doctor posted:I've come to the point in my life where I feel it's time for me to learn as much about American history as I can. Currently on my line-up is 1776 by McCullough and after that I have The People's History of the United States by Zinn. What other important pieces would you guys recommend for entry level American history up to relatively present day? Zinn is crap. Read Foner instead.
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Dec 17, 2015 00:18
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Grenrow posted:This is similar to what I've read about the decolonization process taking place in Korea in the late 40s. While many blame the American military occupation for propping up Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese, there were plenty of those types in the North Korean sphere as well (especially, as you pointed out, in the middling to lower ranks of civil society). There was also the issue of defining who exactly was a collaborator: was it every businessman who worked with the Japanese? Every cop? Every bureaucrat? It was tricky to define and, in the end, US authorities often didn't bother to sort it out. This had disastrous consequences when revolts broke out. When mutinying soldiers and communist revolutionaries seized the town of Yosu in 1948, they started off executing people who had openly collaborated with the Japanese or Americans (rich landowners, the local police), but then ran out of collaborators and started killing people for crimes like dressing too well after a quick sentencing from a kangaroo court that they called the "People's Death Courts." It's really interesting how these tensions ended up shaping so much of the post-WWII world order and domestic politics in so many countries. Weren't a lot of the early state propagandists in North Korea people who had done the same sort of propaganda work for Imperial Japan? At least, I'm pretty sure B.R. Meyers said something like that.
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May 1, 2016 06:12
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kalthir posted:Just finished Mary Beard's SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. It was...pretty bad. The first 150 pages were a horrible slog, and after that the book just kinda meanders for 400 pages and fails to coalesce into a coherent narrative. I actually really liked SPQR. The ultra-skeptical view of the traditional narrative of the early Republic and the institution-focused (rather than personality-focused) view of the Emperor's role were interesting, even if I wasn't 100% convinced. I also got a much clearer view of the Republic's structure and its civil wars than I had gotten from anything I'd read previously.
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Dec 5, 2016 05:12
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cloudchamber posted:Carr's book isn't really a history of history, so to speak, it's just him giving his own view of historical writing (and acts as this weird preview of the duibious argumment he'd go on to make about Stalinist collectivisation being part of an inevitable historical process.) There's definitely some uncomfortable political undertones to the book, yeah, like when he quotes dictators as though they were philosophers of history.
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Sep 19, 2017 07:00
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FingersMaloy posted:Somewhat of a cliche, but Guns, Germs, and Steel was my first and only intro to the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. I took a lot from that book, and it’s an enjoyable read. The comparative history of Polynesia he does at the end to illustrate the effects of geography is super interesting. Apparently a lot of it is considered wrong, though.
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Dec 7, 2017 15:53
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chernobyl kinsman posted:its good to keep in mind though that hobsbawm was a hardcore marxist who uh defended the Holdomor and his writings about Soviet Russia are sort of...evasive Interesting piece about Hobsbawn's politics here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/11/20/the-last-romantic/
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Jan 6, 2018 15:12
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CountFosco posted:I've read quite a bit of ancient history, and the sense I get is that Scott greatly overrestimates the level of suffering and abject servitude that developed in the first proto-states. I can't help but suspect that his vision of history is colored by the pervasive and understandable collective guilt that westerners feel over the chattel slavery that was brought to the New World, but slavery as slavery was not always quite that bad. A moral evil, to be sure, but the Caribbean and deep south plantation owners really ratcheted up the evil to mustache-twirling levels. Further, the proportions of society that were slaves varied from society to society, with the Roman empire perhaps reaching the apogee of a slave state. Throughout much of the pharonic period, slaves were less a proportion of society than they would have been in Rome, and within Egypt there were different types of ways of being a slave, from the more brutal to relatively moderate situations which were more akin to serfdom. Further, I think he underestimates the supposedly benign nature of non-agricultural societies. Gengis Khan emerged from an entirely pastoral situation. I see this line of argument a lot, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable (especially when it's made in defense of the Roman Empire specifically, which, to be fair, you're not doing). In particular, I think people tend to gloss over how normalized sexual abuse of slaves was in many slaveholding societies (including the Roman Empire, ancient Athens, and the Ottoman Empire). Though you're right to point out that that there were degrees of slavery even within particular societies; an educated Greek slave working as a tutor in a Roman household was definitely in a very different position to the slaves being worked to death in the mines.
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Jun 9, 2018 02:50
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cloudchamber posted:The one which compares Davies to Mr Toad? That one is really great. It was pubished in the New Republic, which I don't think has an archive of its reviews online. You can find it reprinted in the last collection of his essays to be published called When the Facts Change. I read the piece of Davies in When the Facts Change too ("Crimes and Misdemeanors"), and yeah, it's hilariously devastating. Judt's view is essentially that Davies suffers from what Orwell would call transferred nationalism (although Judt doesn't explicitly name-drop Orwell) in favor of Poland. This leads Davies to, among other issues, write some borderline anti-Semitic things. Judt also notes that Davies is prone to getting dates and other facts wrong all over the place. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Jul 5, 2018 |
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Jul 5, 2018 01:32
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Cythereal posted:I was gifted Guns, Germs, and Steel today, and I seem to recall this book being rather controversial. Is it the good kind of controversial, or should I politely donate it to a library a few months from now? I believe a lot of it is considered overly simplistic or outright wrong. In general, historians today aren't bit fans of grand theories of history.
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Aug 24, 2018 21:12
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Boatswain posted:Any good surveys of Chinese history? I'm interested in titles which cover periods up to and including the Qing dynasty. I enjoyed John Keay's China: A History.
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Feb 2, 2019 03:15
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Minenfeld! posted:What I liked about Keay's book was that it didn't suffer from time compression the further back in history you went. The book has just as much to say about ancient China as it does the 20th century. If anything, Keay compresses time in the other direction a bit, a decision he explicitly justifies: https://books.google.com/books?id=D...ulching&f=false
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Feb 2, 2019 18:45
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A human heart posted:well obviously that guy is a dumbass who thinks that democracy means 'has parliamentary elections' but the idea that russian under putin isn't a democracy but that russia under yeltsin was is pretty funny specifically. I mean, it was more of a democracy under Yeltsin, I guess. Russia really doesn't have much of a democratic tradition, does it? They've had, what, one actually fair election ever?
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May 25, 2019 18:12
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Catherine the Great made some attempts to implement (her understanding of) Enlightenment ideas. It didn't go over very well with the nobles and she gave up, IIRC. Though I believe the "democratic" element of Catherine's attempted "reforms" was pretty limited even by the standards of the time anyway.
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May 26, 2019 03:01
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cloudchamber posted:I don't think there was a date in which it was revealed to be fake exactly. As soon as it was released a lot of Soviet scholars pointed to a huge number of issues with it, but a very influential one called EH Carr, claimed that there was some truth in the book despite acknowledging its flaws. (He took this position probably because the journal seemed to hold evidence backing his perspective on aspects of Stalin's decision making.) A load of writers, including Shirer, took the supposed journal serious due to this, but since Carr's death and the waning of his stature in Soviet historiography virtually everyone has dismissed it as phony. I've done a dive into JSTOR, etc., about it. I found some interesting commentary on the "journal" and other forgeries apparently by the same people: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1956-04-01/notes-journal (amusingly concise April 1956 review) Wolfe, Bertram D. "The Case of the Litvinov Diary." Encounter, January 1956, pp. 39-47. https://voiks.livejournal.com/312858.html. (The same article can be found on Commentary, but finding an article like this on Livejournal amuses me. Points out errors and implausibilities, as well as (self-)plagiarism from memoirs of former Soviet diplomat Gregory Bessedovsky.) Blackstock, Paul W. “‘Books for Idiots’: False Soviet ‘Memoirs.’” The Russian Review, vol. 25, no. 3, 1966, pp. 285–296. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/126957. (On the bogus Soviet memoirs produced by a group of emigres led by Bessedovsky, including "Litvinov's" journal.) Agursky, Mikhail. “SOVIET DISINFORMATION AND FORGERIES.” International Journal on World Peace, vol. 6, no. 1, 1989, pp. 13–30. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20751319. (Outright claims that Bessedovsky was a Soviet agent all along; I'm not sure of the truth of this.) Basically, everyone with any real knowledge of the USSR except Carr realized that it was probably fake almost immediately, but the fakeness gradually became even more obvious over time.
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Nov 18, 2019 04:53
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Epicurius posted:Remember too that a lot of WPA slave narratives were collected by white interviewers, so some of the interviewees might have been reluctant to criticize white slaveholders to other white people, for fear of causing offense or trouble. This is a key point, yeah. See the discussion and cited articles at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Narrative_Collection#Legacy
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Mar 19, 2020 20:03
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Silver2195 posted:This is a key point, yeah. See the discussion and cited articles at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Narrative_Collection#Legacy This article on manipulative editing of ex-slave narratives from Mississippi also deserves mention: https://journals.openedition.org/orda/522
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Mar 19, 2020 20:28
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Fighting Trousers posted:Any recs for good books on the French Resistance, or any of the anti-Nazi resistance movements during WW2? I found Madame Fourcade's Secret War interesting.
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Apr 10, 2020 14:35
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Dreylad posted:I still think E.H Carr's What Is History? is worth a read. It was published in 1961, but it gives you an idea of how historians' understanding of history has evolved over time, which is one way to get a handle on how historiography has developed. What Is History is a very strange book in a lot of ways. I've seen it argued that it's really a roundabout apologia for Stalinism, and I can understand why (e.g., Carr's view, if I understand him correctly, that historians can and should make value judgments about whether something is "progressive," but not about whether it's "moral," and even his quoting of Stalin and Mao as though they were philosophers). Despite this, I think it has a lot of interesting and even valuable ideas (e.g., the distinction between a "fact about the past" and a "fact of history"), and it's provoked some interesting responses (e.g., the pushback against Carr's opposition to counterfactuals).
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Jun 10, 2020 21:36
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Disinterested posted:I'm still brewing on a post but I will say that I think Carr was right about counterfactuals and that his beliefs about them are still totally dominant in the academy, but people do quite enjoy writing articles about how we shouldn't be too elitist about it. Don't meaningful statements about causation usually involve implicit counterfactuals? Obviously professional historians shouldn't be devoting their time to writing alternate history novels, but I don't think it's always wrong for them to make those counterfactuals explicit.
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Jun 11, 2020 01:56
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Dreylad posted:The general argument starting with Carr and carrying on to recent historiography is that historians shouldn't concern themselves with speculation, but concern themselves with what did happen and why. I'm saying that the "why" usually at least suggests a counterfactual; to say that X was the main cause of Y can reasonably be taken to imply that if X hadn't happened, all else being equal, Y wouldn't have happened either.
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Jun 11, 2020 04:17
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Epicurius posted:It wasn't really ranting. They basically just said that even though people can think what they want, it's weird that people think of him as a hero when he killed about 11% of the world's population. Sources for the 11% figure? I see it tossed around occasionally, but never with a real citation. But I agree with the broader point. He's often defended on the grounds that he did basically the same things as Alexander the Great on a larger scale and more successfully, but even if that's true, it's more an argument against Alexander (and Napoleon, Oda Nobunaga, etc.) than in favor of Genghis.
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Aug 31, 2020 14:11
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Epicurius posted:That was the tweet's claim, but Frank McLynn, in Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy, puts the total number of deaths from his wars at 37.5 million, about 30 million in China, and other people have made estimates up to 40 million or more (a lot of it depends on how many people you think lived in medieval Iran, and how reliable you think Persian casualty estimates are. McLynn downplays them). Estimates of world population from around 1200 range from 360-400 million. Thanks.
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Aug 31, 2020 14:53
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I assume he didn’t write them concurrently. So maybe his brain rotted along side writing the books. I mean he sounds like a US version of David Irving outside the fact that Irving was never a good historian. Isn't Irving's The Mare's Nest considered respectable history even now? 
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May 21, 2021 19:58
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Vasukhani posted:Yeah, usually this is the power of "outsider identity" in history. Take Thomas De Waal's Black Garden for example, it is the only history book I've ever seen recommended by "both sides" of an ethnic conflict (some denounce it for suggesting that their side also did bad things, but in general both see it as reasonable). But there is also a tendency for outsider historians to develop fetishes that are even stronger and stranger than those of people born into it. Yep. George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism posted:But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic – more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest – than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.
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May 24, 2021 19:31
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sbaldrick posted:It’s been a few years since I read the Anarchy but one arguments that Dalrymple makes is while the Mughal Empire was basically continual civil war after The "it was a time of great artistic achievement so it doesn’t really matter" line of thinking isn't purely a post-colonial thing. Orson Welles posted:You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
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Mar 3, 2022 03:34
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knox posted:I'd love to hear your counter "non-bunk" assertions on the topics, in comparison to the detailed novel about the CIA's longest serving and most influential director. The use of the word "novel" there is an interesting Freudian slip.
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Apr 24, 2022 18:25
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Hyrax Attack! posted:That's true, there are some interesting ones that include the Allies winning but Germany having prepped an underground resistance for years that makes the occupation a nightmare or for the US Civil War having the Union win but Lee never surrenders and commits his army to bushwhacking from the hills so the South goes under permanent military occupation that is terrible for both sides. I feel like this is a Gay Black Hitler thing. My understanding is that while the Nazis took some steps in that direction towards the end of the war, it never got very far in part because "partisans bad" was so deeply baked into their own propaganda.
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Sep 2, 2022 01:02
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team overhead smash posted:It’s kind of a tangent to what you’re asking for but I found Debt, the first 5,000 years interesting as it covered the periods and conditions when currency broke down. Should cover some of the gaps and alternatives people used. How accurate is this considered? Much like The Dawn of Everything, I’ve seen a few economists and/or historians saying that Graeber gets a lot wrong in it.
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Oct 18, 2022 18:14
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I think the usual term is pseudohistory, not alt-history. Alt-history makes me think of Harry Turtledove.
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Dec 22, 2022 02:43
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:mythology fans; My understanding is that the Norse gods were a lot more kill-able than the Greek ones. Edith Hamilton argued that this meant that the Norse gods could be "heroic" in a way the Greek gods couldn't. In general, it's futile to seek too much consistency in Greek mythology. It seems like in some stories the gods are innately immortal, while in others they apparently maintain their immortality by drinking nectar and eating ambrosia (or even by eating nectar and drinking ambrosia). Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 16:31
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Chairman Capone posted:This is probably more appropriate for this thread than the book club thread, so I'll post this here: Interesting. I was about to ask if Powell had some crank theory about the "racial characteristics" of Macedonians, but then I remembered that he did actually have a reputable academic background as a classicist; he might actually have had something relevant to say about Alexander.
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May 8, 2023 17:53
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Looking for a really, really good book on indigenous American history. Pre 1492. Obviously this is a tricky field for everything we don't know, and most of what we do know is from archaeology. But I'm interested in a book that best finds a compelling narrative in what is known of the pre-contact history of the Americas. I'm especially interesting in North America, especially Mississippian mound culture centered around Cahokia, but that's even harder because there wasn't any stonework or writing. There is literally a book about this called 1491.
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Jun 3, 2023 19:17
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I think there was an interesting companion book by someone that went into detail about what was surprisingly true, what was orientalist silliness, and what was somewhere in-between.
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Jul 12, 2023 23:03
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Punkin Spunkin posted:I liked Schama's Citizens when I was 13 (had a big old hardcover) but the fact that it's reactionary hysterical bullshit really makes me hesitant to actually recommend it to anybody even if you preempt it with a disclaimer about its politics. Is there anything about it you think is factually incorrect, or do you just not like the implied conclusions? Edit: To be clear, I haven't read the book, so this isn't a rhetorical question. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 21:38
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The non-Roman ones are basically taken from Holinshed's Chronicles. But I think what Bandiet was asking for was a book about the actual history of the Wars of the Roses, etc., not Holinshed's version.
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Jan 27, 2024 20:38
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