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Any recommendations on the various wars of the 18th century, either individually or taken together? I just started re-reading Richard Holmes' excellent Redcoat: The British Soldier in the the Age of Horse and Musket and it's gotten me interested in the period again. I'm pretty well covered in post AWI/French Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars, but would like to try and sort out some of the earlier stuff like the wars of the Austrian/Spanish succession, Seven Years War, etc. Anything to do with the late 17th C and Louis XIV would probably be helpful to as my knowledge there is limited as well. Who the hell was that guy the Duke of Marlborough and why was he always fighting the French (and Bavarians?)?
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Aug 25, 2019 15:41
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Bill Bryson’s ‘At Home: A Short History of Private Life’ is a really amusing and interesting look deep look at houses, especially 19th c. English and American houses, and the people who lived in them. Kind of of in the Mary Roach/Mark Kurlansky vein but with a bit more Bill Bryson wit. The audiobook is very good too.
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Nov 17, 2019 00:45
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Neurosis posted:Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money is good. The name may give you pause, but it's from when he was doing his own archival work, where his books were pretty careful in their coverage. Seconding this as a history book and a basic financial literacy 'what is a bond and a derivative' book that's very well written. Niall Ferguson has gone off the rails a bit since then, but Ascent of Money is very good and not long. It's more about international trade than bankers but "A Splendid Exchange: How trade shaped the world" by William Bernstein is a pretty awesome book that covers trade (and also colonization, especially re: european chartered trade companies) from ancient Egypt to present and really focuses on how for much of the past 2000 years at least, India/the Indian ocean was the engine of world trade. He has some really neat historical anecdotes-one about barbers in mexico city in the 1600s asking the government for protection from immigrant Chinese barbers undercutting their prices springs to mind. The world has been smaller for longer than we often realize.
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Dec 17, 2019 02:37
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Grand Fromage posted:Extremely wide net: any history audiobooks you've particularly enjoyed? I have a couple Audible credits kicking around to use and no real idea what to spend them on. I'm open to anything, preferably something pre-modern and not American (unless it's pre-Columbian). The longer the better, some unabridged 50 hour thing would be ideal. This is really a great book https://www.audible.com/pd/A-Splend...c3_lProduct_1_1 Kaiser Schnitzel posted:
This is a very amusing and detailed book that might not be what you’re looking for, but I really enjoyed it, and should revisit it: https://www.audible.com/pd/English-...h_c3_lProduct_1 He wrote a really excellent history of medicine “the greatest benefit to Mankind” which is sadly not on audible.
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Jan 27, 2020 04:34
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FPyat posted:How much would it teach me about the other German states? It will teach you when Prussia conquered them. There's actually quite a bit about Prussia's place in the Empire and relations with other states etc, but it definitely is a history of Prussia, not of pre-Germany Germany generally. It's very good though.
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Jan 29, 2020 03:08
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I just re-read Mcpherson's most excellent Battle Cry of Freedom, and want to know more about Reconstruction and why/how it ultimately failed. Are there any good even-keeled books you fine folks would recommend?
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Mar 17, 2020 02:00
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Fighting Trousers posted:Eric Foner's Reconstruction is still considered the seminal work, but a couple of other good ones: Henry Louis Gates' Stony the Road and Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt. Brenda Wineapple's Ecstatic Nation and Richard White's The Republic for Which it Stands both cover the period as part of broader overviews. I've been reading some of the WPA Slave narratives online and am struck by how often the former slaves have fond memories of slavery and wish to go back. Of course not every slave owner was Simon Legree, and some tell of a very different, much more violent experience, but it was very surprising to me. I've chalked much of it up to people remembering their childhood more fondly than reality, being fairly young when enslaved, and a yearning back for a period of stability in the desperation of the Great Depression, not to mention wanting to tell the nice white person with the tape recorder what they want to hear, but one also can't quite throw out the testimony of people who were there. Are they are any good, broad collections of other accounts from former slaves I should check out? It seems like accounts collected from freed slaves who were older at Surrender (which is not a term i'd really encounter before but is what most of the narratives I've read say-not emancipation) and made when the memory of slavery was fresher in the mind might not be so rose-colored.
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Mar 19, 2020 18:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:The other thing you can’t discount is the editorial choices of the author. They might have not used some of the more negative accounts or given the positive one greater emphasis. They certainly don't whitewash everything-there's plenty of whippings and beatings (though it seems more usually by the overseer than the slave owner-again is this the truth as they remembered it, or is the overseer a scapegoat for what the slave owner did). It also mentions a case (graphic violence ahead) of an escaped slave who had killed a white man being chained to the ground and burned alive. This struck me especially because I had read of something similar in some old family history and discounted it, but it seems to have been a real and not uncommon punishment for slaves who killed white people
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Mar 19, 2020 19:22
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Silver2195 posted:This article on manipulative editing of ex-slave narratives from Mississippi also deserves mention: https://journals.openedition.org/orda/522 I ordered a copy of Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies by John W. Blassingame as a not-compiled-by-white-people alternative for $5 used, so we'll see how it differs.
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Mar 20, 2020 02:20
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FMguru posted:The standard non-scholarly overview is John Julius Norwich's History of Byzantium. It's a three volume work; there's also a one-volume abridged edition. For a slice of life look and a few deepish dives into a few subjects, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin is good, but more focused on the city itself than the empire as whole. May be more of a social history than what you are looking for, but it's very readable and not particularly long-her goal is very much to paint a layman a picture of what Byzantium was.
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May 20, 2020 01:44
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Look Sir Droids posted:I asked about the Byzantine Empire because of Crusader Kings 2.
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May 20, 2020 19:48
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Two entirely separate things: Is there a good general history/overview of the Holy Roman Empire? I’m starting my third attempt on Peter Wilson’s ‘The Thirty Years War’ and he does a great job explaining the empire at that time, but I’d love to know more about things before and after. Is there a good book about the evolution of whaling? Like Mark Kurlansky or Bill Bryson does whales? I don’t need (or want) something super academic.
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Jul 22, 2020 18:58
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BigglesSWE posted:So I finished "The Great Mortality" which was an excellent read. Much grateful for this thread for pointing it out. It’s 50 years old, but Norman Cantor’s ‘Civilization of the Middle Ages’ is really well written and a great overview of the period.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:00
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Rommel1896 posted:In an unrelated question, the British navy dominated the world for centuries, and I don't really understand why. Like, in the Napoleonic Era the French built ships using the same technology and fought using similar tactics. They had lots of money and resources, yet the Royal Navy crushed them and everyone else with seeming ease. Can anyone recommend any books that would explain why they were so peerless? (That second question might be too broad to answer, but I'm hoping for some insight, particularly why Nelson was so great). You might ask in the Military history thread in A/T too: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3950461&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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Jan 14, 2021 02:43
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Grand Fromage posted:I've been notified I have four audible credits gathering dust so hit me with your favorite recent history books. Good pop history, academic is awful to listen to. I'm interested in most things but would prioritize ancient Mediterranean, pre-colonial Africa, pre-Columbian Americas, and East Asia at the moment.
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Mar 13, 2021 16:22
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StrixNebulosa posted:Picking up Battle Cry of Freedom, thank you! Battle Cry of Freedom is not only the best one volume book on the Civil War ever it is also IMO one of the very best history books ever. It's a pretty complete and thorough introduction to the subject and paints a great picture of the people and events and the world in which they lived and happened. He uses a ton of primary sources and it's telling that half the book is setting the stage for the war and the war itself seems almost like a footnote or something. It's a good audiobook too if that's your thing. Foote is very very much a product of his time and his background and upbringing, and needs to be viewed that way. He's a fantastic writer and his historical errors are mostly errors of omission (esp. re: slavery, southern atrocities as others have noted). I think his work is especially important in how it influenced popular perceptions of the ACW for another generation or two after/during civil rights, and its worth reading, but read Battle Cry of Freedom first
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May 19, 2021 18:08
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SubG posted:
Confederate soldiers fought for an awful lot of different and nuanced reasons (mostly to do with maintaining the institutions of slavery, for sure!) and for anyone interested in those reasons, I would highly recommend General Lee's Army by Joseph Glatthaar. It's got a ton of social history and research about the actual confederate soldiers in the Army of Northern VA and it was a really fascinating read for me.
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May 20, 2021 14:25
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MeatwadIsGod posted:Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution and Age of Capital seem like they'd fit the bill. I haven't read Age of Empire but presumably it's just as excellent as the first two. Yeah I have been listening to them and they are great. It’s a bit more social history and towards the end of the period, but Barbara Tuchman’s ‘The Proud Tower’ is good too.
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May 26, 2021 03:30
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Dreadnaught by Robert Massie has a pretty good broad overview of the later 19th C great power conflicts too and plenty of talk about big steam engines and steel production and shipping tonnage and other such Vicky things.
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May 26, 2021 14:53
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Stairmaster posted:what are some good books about the napoleonic period You really can’t beat the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian for a meticulously researched portrait of the period that are also some of the best historical novels ever written in their own right. They even have their own thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3393240
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Jun 17, 2021 03:48
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Dapper_Swindler posted:whats a good book on the pilgrims/puritains in america? and also salem witch trial. i have always found them interesting folks despite being weird reactionaries.
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Jun 28, 2021 18:27
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Anyone have a good book to recommend about Quakers/Quakerism? The segment about the Quakers in Albion's Seed was really interesting to me.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:47
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Is there a good broad overview of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, preferably on Audible since I have a bunch of unused credits?
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Feb 24, 2022 03:21
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Any recommendations for a history of post-war/Cold War/post-cold war Britain? Someone more ideologically neutral, especially about the Thatcher-era, would be great. Mostly trying to better understand the domestic social/economical/political stuff like nationalising/privatising whole industries, the power and decline of trades unions, and the various iterations of the British welfare state during the period, and how the various political parties fit into that over time.
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Jul 20, 2022 15:27
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Stairmaster posted:A history book is in of itself ideology yaffle posted:I've only read "Never Again" which is the first part of Peter Hennessy's trilogy about post war Britain, but It was enjoyable and quite readable, someday I'll get around to the other two. I think they stop short of the Thatcher era, and I don't have any recommendations for that because its all too depressing.
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Jul 22, 2022 15:05
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Is there a good single volume book covering the Creek/Red Stick War and Indian Removal, especially one that covers the internal politics/culture/social history of the 'Five Civilized Tribes'?
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Aug 28, 2022 01:26
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Count Thrashula posted:So, my knowledge of naval technology and warfare has a huge gap from about 1812 through to 1942. What's a good intro book to ironclad/pre-dreadnought through dreadnought/WW1 naval combat? Or anything more specifically focused in any of those areas is fine.
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Sep 20, 2022 04:58
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Unfortunately Dreadnaught only touches on the actual naval arms race and especially the technological development. It’s just not that kind of book, it’s really a general leadup to WWI book. Castles of Steel is very in-depth with the WWI naval war though. It's been forever since I read it but I thought I remembered a fair bit of chat about big guns and thicknesses of armor plate etc, but you are definitely right that it's much broader than just big ships. It gives great context to those big ships, however.
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Sep 20, 2022 17:41
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Dapper_Swindler posted:what's good book on the austro-hungarian empire, preferably near the end. i have been playing isonzo(great game) and reading the white war and i am curious to know more about the empire because its such a weird and odd duck europian empire wise. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27311725-the-habsburg-empire I also learned a ton about the AHE from Christopher Clarke's The Sleepwalkers but, I started out knowing very little about it at all.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:00
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Kull the Conqueror posted:I finished Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 the other day. It may have been the driest book I've ever read but having known nothing about the period I found it very informative. Anybody else get down with it? I didn't find that dry at all, and it was really helpful to me to read a Marxist viewpoint on history. The others in the series are mostly great, the last one or two have a bit of a blind spot around the realities of the Soviet Union, but he was a really brilliant and important historian.
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Oct 18, 2022 00:56
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Any recommendations on the revolutions of 1848? Even better if it’s available on audible. It seems like a hugely important event that I don’t really know much about.
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Nov 20, 2022 19:29
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Well he was still a Russian autocrat
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Mar 2, 2023 04:28
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FPyat posted:The Third Reich in Power is drat bleak, simply disheartening. Maybe it's a stupid thing to say. We’re all still waiting on a happy, uplifting book about nazis
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Mar 22, 2023 14:25
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Gripweed posted:What's the best single volume history of the Napoleonic wars?
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Apr 28, 2023 18:00
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Rand Brittain posted:I really enjoyed A Distant Mirror, which is probably going to have a lot of influence on the RPG I'm designing, and it also got me to finally decide to take a vacation to London and Paris this summer and see some stuff. Norman Cantor’s ‘The Civilization of the Middle Ages’ is good and neat and well written and similarly made me think about RPG’s (which may or may not be a great endorsement of a history book)
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May 7, 2023 02:46
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Anyone read this? https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Blood-Military-History-German-Speaking/dp/0674987624 It popped up on my audible recommendations. I enjoyed his book on the HRE and enjoyed what of his book on the 30 years war I made it through.
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May 20, 2023 02:06
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I've been listening to Christopher Clark's new book on the revolutions of 1848, Revolutionary Spring and so far it's been great. I've enjoyed his other books and think he is generally well-regarded but I don't have a ton of knowledge about the revolutions to compare to (hence why I am reading the book)
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Apr 1, 2024 01:34
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Guns of August is a good book and an easy read, but if you want a better book with more modern scholarship on how WW1 started, The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark is really excellent.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:32
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I'd add Robert Massie's Dreadnaught as a surprisingly readable book for a seemingly niche subject that also provides really great background on the 20-30 years of Great Power competition that lead up to WWI. I don't know enough to speak to its scholarship (it's definitely more of a popular history than an academic one) but again just for background it was great, especially as an American-educated person where history class gives the Gilded Age/Belle Époque about 4 pages.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:51
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