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This is a real table-breaker in dead-tree form, but well worth it: http://www.amazon.com/London-Biography-Peter-Ackroyd/dp/0385497717/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1328827394&sr=8-4 It's not a history of kings and queens, it's a history of ordinary people (best exemplified by the bits where it mentions how various and numerous monarchs issued various and numerous proclamations to the effect that the growth of London Must Be Curtailed At All Costs, all of which were politely ignored); but it does have the wide thousands-of-years span you're looking for. It's a decent enough starting point, since an awful lot of things in English/British history either happened in London or had some sort of consequence for London. Now, for a classic kings-and-queens story you really can't beat the seminal Our Island Story, which is by no means an ideal treatment of history (some parts of it are recountings of myths or legends, some parts of it are patrician and patronising, some parts of it treat Shakespeare as a reputable historian), but it's a good starting point for you to read through, with constant convenient marker points as the monarchs come and go, and see what makes you think "This period sounds interesting, I'll find out a bit more about it" or "I'm not sure I agree with that, I'll see what other people have to say about the time". What it'll also do is give you a solid grounding in the British national myth, which is vital when so much of history today is "The Real Story of the Putney Debates", or "Untold Histories of Life During The Anarchy"; it helps if you know the classical perspective that's trying to be exploded. If you do read it, please make sure and read 1066 And All That right afterwards, though. The trouble with trying to find something more modern with such a grand scale is that it's really not possible to do any one part of history the justice it deserves, and explore it in the depth that it deserves, in the context of a Grand History; so naturally the tendency has been towards dealing with a period in depth - you also have to consider the rise of social history, the recognition that there's more to history than kings and queens and battles and lords. Being Victorian, the Victorians didn't really have a problem with making trivial assertions about things, ignoring things that didn't fit a certain narrative, and pretending that monarchs and battles are all that mattered. edit: On the subject of Parliament, here is something that looks interesting: http://www.histparl.ac.uk/ Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Feb 10, 2012 |
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Feb 10, 2012 00:03
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There's a spectacularly hypocritical statue in Ostend near the beach, of Leopold II surrounded by...well, just look at it. (It makes me wonder if JK Rowling knew about it when she wrote the Ministry of Magic in Book 7 with the Magic is Might statue.) Rah rah, everyone loves him, locals and Africans alike, one big happy family. Now, look more closely at the Congolese gentleman on the far left  About ten years ago, an activist group cut his hand off in protest. The council decided not to repair the damage.
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Mar 5, 2015 20:31
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It doesn't help that it was perpetrated by Belgium, a seemingly inoffensive mayonnaise-and-frites-loving small country best known to popular culture as the one the Germans are always marching through to have it out with the French.
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Mar 17, 2015 22:54
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walgreenslatino posted:I'm looking for a book on Allied treatment of Axis combatants and POWs. Specifically about retaliation for Malmedy, summary execution of prisoners, that sort of thing. I once read a portion of a really excellent book dealing with the subject, but now I can't find it for the life of me This is not exactly what you asked for, but I found it fascinating, and if you're into this sort of thing you probably will also: http://www.amazon.com/Soldaten-Fighting-Killing-Secret-Transcripts/dp/0307958124 It's a book of transcripts of German POWs in Britain talking among themselves, and the insights it gives into the men. Absolutely compelling. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Jul 31, 2015 |
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Jul 31, 2015 20:43
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Cythereal posted:The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970 by John Darwin How much space does Africa get? It sounds great as long as Egypt and Nyasaland don't disappear with an offended squeak under the weight of the Raj.
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Aug 19, 2015 23:17
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Kuiperdolin posted:1984 was not very good; there were a lot of inaccuracies. It's not meant to be history! The nerve of some people. I mean, if you can't see by the mention of an utterly ridiculous and fictional war with our noble Eastasian allies that this is clearly prolefeed of the lowest order, what hope is there left for you? Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Oct 10, 2015 |
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Oct 10, 2015 23:31
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Gringo Heisenberg posted:Anyone have recommendations for first person non-fiction war books? WW1 era onward to the Vietnam war. Books written by or with lots of input and experiences and thoughts from guys who were on the front lines and saw lots of action sort of thing The comedian Spike Milligan wrote an extensive set of memoirs about being called up for the Second World War, where he was in the Royal Artillery. The ratio of combat to rear life reflects the old military saying that 95% of service is killing time, and the other 5% is the killing time, but there's plenty of life under fire from North Africa and Italy. At first it reads like nothing more than a light, comedic set of stories about a bunch of crazy young blokes on an overgrown boys' adventure weekend, but it's very important to follow John Cleese's example and not confuse "solemnity" with "seriousness". Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (Training in England) Rommel? Gunner Who? (Action in North Africa) Monty: His Part in My Victory (Arsing around between battles in North Africa) Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall (Action in Italy from the beaches to Monte Cassino) Where Have All The Bullets Gone? (Life as a pyschiatric casualty) If you're in the mood for something a bit less outwardly silly, then my recommendation can be nothing other than Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, the definitive French memoir of the First World War; in which a raving Socialist gets called up in 1914 and spends four years in the trenches complaining about everything and trying not to die. I could write an entire essay about how great it is and what an antidote it is to even the most strident anti-war memoirists who usually can't help finding something to be positive about (usually individual bravery, camaraderie within an individual unit, or something like that) despite all the hell going on around them. Instead, here is the tale of Corporal Cathala, which encapsulates everything you need to know about the book. It's late 1915, shortly after the end of the Third Battle of Artois. quote:The next day, October 12, at 9 p.m. we went back to the front line, relieving the 281st Regiment. Arriving at the firing line, we noticed assault ladders placed every ten meters along the parapet. This sight made us shiver, just as if we were walking past the gallows. In our trench were the remnants of a German heavy artillery battery, completely wiped out by our own artillery: shells, equipment, and German corpses, all buried together. Night and day, they put us to work excavating the dugouts in this strong-point. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Nov 2, 2015 |
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Nov 2, 2015 18:25
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Trier posted:I'm currently reading The Blackest Streets by Sarah Wise The Victorian Underworld, by Donald Thomas, covers the existence that more than a few of those asylum inmates would have come from, or at least been adjacent to.
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Nov 21, 2015 03:09
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I'd go with Peter Hart's The Great War: A Combat History. It's a bit dry, heavily focused on the fighting at the expense of the politics, and a bit dismissive of Entente efforts outwith the Western Front, but it'll do what you're looking for. If you wanted something with a bit more colour to the prose, analysis of geopolitics, or opinionated profiles of key players, there's Meyer with A World Undone; I found his prose a bit grating and overly-amused by repeating the same joke, but that could just be me. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Nov 23, 2015 |
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Nov 23, 2015 18:30
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If you're into that sort of thing you may be interested in Soldaten, which is about analysing the transcripts of secretly-recorded conversations of German prisoners in British POW camps. It includes an extensive section on their expressed opinions of the Jews, the Nazis, and Hitler himself. (Spoilers; there are claimed Nazis who aren't sure about the Fuhrer's anti-Semitism, and claimed opponents of Naziism who say "mind you, the one thing they have got right is their Jewish policy...")
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Feb 3, 2016 00:49
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Stairmaster posted:What's a good book on the air war in world war 1? Are you looking for colour or dry facts?
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Nov 21, 2016 22:13
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Peter Hart (the bloke at the Imperial War Museum whose job is to look after the poo poo-tons of oral history they get given) has written four books about British fliers; his stuff all tells a general high-level narrative, and then keeps dropping down to the memories of people who were on the ground (or in the air, hahaha) participating in it, so you've got context and can see what they were trying to achieve even if the blokes themselves don't have much of an idea. Tumult in the Clouds (general 1914-1918, no ebook, with Nigel Steel) Somme Success (the air effort over the Somme as they applied lessons learned and developed tactics invented in 1915) Bloody April (the kicking the RFC took at the Battle of Arras in 1917 after German innovation lapped them) Aces Falling (how air warfare came of age in 1918 with the development of All Arms Battle, and ended the days when fighter aces would string together 50 kills or more and fly until they died or were shot down). Pick any one of those and you'll have a good time.
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Nov 22, 2016 14:29
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As far as I know, nobody's written English-language primary-source-based works about colonial soldiers outwith academic publishing and there are no English-language autobiographies. You will find quite a few layman's-audience books that attempts to give an overview of the colonial soldier's experience, some of them with occasional primary source exceprts, but nothing dedicated solely to primary sources. The closest thing you'll get is something like Indian Voices of the Great War, a collection of letters which you can have for just yer £32.76; or you can read things written by their white officers, more of which go out of copyright every year.
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Nov 13, 2017 14:21
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Beef Hardcheese posted:Any recommendations for books about WW1 in general? I've been on a massive Russian History audiobook kick lately*. That and the recent spate of WW1 memes in the PYF Memes thread (see below) has spurred my interest. I'd recommend Peter Hart's A Combat History of the Great War, and figure out from there what you're most interested in. If you already know you want to know more about what the Russian Empire was doing, sure, Prit Buttar on the Eastern Front, but pair it with something like Roger Ford's Eden to Armageddon or Edward J Erickson's* Ordered to Die for information about the most successful Russian general of the war, the Caucasus campaign, and their involvement in Persia. *Listen to nothing he says about the Armenian genocide; he has to deny it in order to get access to the Ottoman archives to write about everything else he writes about. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Jan 13, 2018 |
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Jan 13, 2018 17:45
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Minenfeld! posted:Are there any good books out there about combat aviation and pilots during the first world war? My grandparents gave me a copy of The Canvas Falcons when I was 6 and between that and playing Red Baron I was in heaven that summer. I was thinking of rereading it, but apparently it's an awful, ahistorical work. Any suggestions? If you want facts and figures about numbers of pilots and technological advancements and numbers of planes built and political funding for aviation and how Bavarian pride kept buggering up German procurement, John H Morrow Jr's The Great War in the Air does an excellent job of getting over what you need to know without being too painful. If you want pilot stories, the Imperial War Museum's Peter Hart is a great way to start; all his general oral histories contain recollections from pilots, and he's also done If you also go to archive.org, you can find a number of obscure long-out-of-print memoirs, including German ace Oswald Boelcke and several veterans of the Lafayette Escadrille, American volunteer pilots who flew for France before the USA joined the war. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 18:10 on May 27, 2018 |
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May 27, 2018 18:05
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Definitely add MacMillan's variably-titled book about the Paris Peace Conference in 1919; it's possible to disagree with the conclusion that the peace was not directly responsible for the rise of Hitler, but it doesn't invalidate the analysis of who was there and what they thought they were trying to do.
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Jun 20, 2018 19:54
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Cyrano4747 posted:You also need to add Fischer’s Germanys war aims in the first world war to that discussion. Add his arguments to the discussion in some form, sure; but his ideas have been, ahem, robustly challenged all the way from 1961, as befits the history of such an epic clusterfuck, and I'm not so sure it belongs in "overviews" given that you've got MacMillan to directly counterbalance Clark on the causes
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Jun 20, 2018 23:29
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Is it time to give Dan Carlin a kicking again? The way he tells August and September 1914 is absolutely 95% cribbed from The Guns of August (the rest is from Niall Ferguson). Which is a fine and readable book, but a lot of the things Tuchman presents as Pure and Unchallenged Fact for the sake of telling a good story have inevitably been shown not to be Pure and Unchallenged Fact. Then there's the delivery. Him sounding like one of those overly enthusiastic Youtube LPers reading out RPG dialogue for the personal accounts is one thing. The relentless portrayal of things as "NOW HERE ARE THE FRENCH AND THEY'RE SCREWED, THEY'RE REALLY SCREWED, UNBELIEVABLY SCREWED, EXCEPT, UNLESS, AND THEN, AND NOW THE GERMANS ARE SCREWED AND THE FRENCH ARE ON TOP, THE GERMANS ARE JUST HOPELESSLY SCREWED, THEY'RE A SHAMBLES, THEY'RE HOPELESS, THEY'RE USELESS, AND NOW, BUT THEN, THE FRENCH WEREN'T EXPECTING THAT, AND NOW ALL IS LOST FOR THE FRENCH, AND NOW THE GERMANS, AND NOW THE FRENCH" over and over and over again is another. (And then, of course, the French immediately disappear from the story the moment they push the Germans back to the Aisne, and don't reappear until Verdun.) He's a low-information gobshite.
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Jul 21, 2018 01:40
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Anyone who uncritically regurgitates the myth about Magna Carta (particularly its original 1215 form) being of any relevance to anyone than a few extremely wealthy and long-dead noblemen, for about 30 seconds, wants all their opinions taking with a huge pinch of salt; cf Lord Sumption's skeptical speech for the 800th anniversary.
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May 25, 2019 02:16
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vyelkin posted:...viewing peasants as both the basis for future socialism and the potential revolutionary class, in contrast to established Marxism that saw urban workers as the revolutionary class. So a whole bunch of university students influenced by this line of thought left their universities and went out into the villages, to try and learn from the peasants how to be good socialists and to try and incite the peasants into being revolutionaries. The conservative and patriarchal peasantry found these middle- and upper-class students extremely bizarre and often reported them to the authorities, or "Jack", as he is usually known
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May 30, 2019 20:59
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quote:I thought I ought to substantiate the nearly endless shade towards Luigi Cadorna, Italian Army Chief of Staff from 1914-1917 (though I realize after writing this that what I actually ought to have done is just told the same bad joke about Cadorna 11 times in a row and let that stand as the explanation) BOOM
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May 3, 2022 19:45
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