/History/ Books Thread

[Anonymous No.13321860]

>Go on /his/ to find good books about history
>Only a bunch of troglodyte threads debating about racebait, /int/posting and discord trannies
/Lit/ give me good books about the customs and manners of the Old World, nobles, peasants and clergymen. Whoever is interested in history is welcome too.

[Anonymous No.13321868]

>>13321860
Any specific eras/topics?

[Anonymous No.13321882]

>>13321860
DO NOT READ THE LADY AND THE UNICORN!
I thought it was about the unicorn tapestry, but it was only a shitty romance. Awful trash.

[Anonymous No.13321897]

>>13321868
Anything from the medieval era until the napoleonic era would be great. Specially from the West (including Russia and all that)

[Anonymous No.13321938]

>>13321897
The Campaigns of Napoleon by Chandler

[Anonymous No.13321964]

Howard Zinn's People's History of the US turned me from a dumb libertarian to a based commie i can't recommend it enough

[Anonymous No.13321970]

>>13321897
Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts is the best one around

[Anonymous No.13321982]

>>13321964
Actually kill yourself. Why do you take pride in reading literal Jewish propaganda. Zinn has been called out by numerous historians.

[Anonymous No.13321988]

>>13321970
Napoleon by Vincent Cronin is also great

[Anonymous No.13322009]

Disregard these plebs, read Herodotus

[Anonymous No.13322041]

>>13321982
>collection of US crimes against humanity of its own people
>jewish propaganda

what historians?

[Anonymous No.13322063]

Any good sengoku era history books?

[Anonymous No.13322076]

>>13321897
>Specially from the West (including Russia and all that)
>Russia

I dont think you know what the west is.

[Anonymous No.13322078]

/his/ is to history as /lit/ is to philosophy--they both only read the wikipedia

[Anonymous No.13322180]

Read more focused academic books than anything else. Something like a grand scope or pop biography book is mostly a waste of time. The rise and fall of the American Whig Party is a great read that gives tons insight on Jacksonian Democracy.

For the medieval era, I believe starting with primary sources is a good idea. Something that examines the Investiture Controversy, specifically between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII would be a good way to understand the changing relationship between church and state in the era, and marks the beginning of the growth of power in the church. Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Conflict: A Brief History with Documents would be an excellent choice.

[Anonymous No.13322230]

>>13322180
What is considered "pop biography book"? Anything that is a biography? Also, primary sources are not that good because they are first, hard to find or to read, and second, talk about a very specific subject instead of the whole thing.

And what is a "academic book"? Is not like they have that in the cover.

[Anonymous No.13322251]

>>13322230
>What is considered "pop biography book"?
Here's some red flags that tell you it's pop History:
-wwii
-popular author
-best selling
-not published by Oxford university Press or Routledge
>And what is a "academic book"?
See this. It has plenty of academic books. They should give you a good idea of what an academic book looks like
https://mega.nz/#F!dlZlDbqL!TXG5bGvWufONkrQAL7b7jA

[Anonymous No.13322325]

>>13322251
Thanks anon. So everything that is popular history is bad or just the thing that try to be "for dummies"?

[Anonymous No.13322334]

>>13322251
>not published by Oxford university Press or Routledge
This is useful if you want to play it really safe, but there is plenty of real academic history not published by these guys. Thanks for backing me up though.
>>13322230
> talk about a very specific subject instead of the whole thing.
The medieval book I recommended contains many primary sources while also providing grater context and fills in the holes.

[Anonymous No.13323643]

>>13321964
Zinn is a good place to start but a bad place to stop. Thinking about history from the peasant or ground up perspective is a cool framework to have, but only reading one perspective would be unwise imo. For example, I'm immersing myself in Cold War covert ops, there are anti-imperialist scholars who offer scathing critiques, but they are sometimes light on contextual details and viewing a period from multiple angles of strategy.
This isn't to say you can't formulate your own view of history ideological or otherwise, just please read broadly and read primary sources.

t. Historian

[Anonymous No.13323686]

>>13323643
>t. Historian
you're a neet too, huh?

[Anonymous No.13323692]

>>13321860
Susan Wise Bauer's books are good despite the fact that she's a woman.

[Anonymous No.13323708]

>>13323643
well I haven't made it to Indiana Jones level adventure quite yet, but I am employed.

[Anonymous No.13323776]

>>13323692
Seconding this. Bauer wrote her books for homeschooled kids, they're not academic at all but great for providing context if you want to do further reading on a subject.
>>13322325
Pop history is just history written for/marketed to people who aren't already knowledgeable about the book's subject.
There's nothing inherently wrong with it, and there are plenty of decently written pop history books out there, but if you don't move on from them you won't learn much.

[Anonymous No.13323795]

>>13322041
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/wineburg-historiography-zinn-122012.html

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/4370

[Anonymous No.13323809]

[Anonymous No.13324548]

This entire series

[Anonymous No.13326023]

>>13321860
>>13322180
>>13322251
>>13323643
Asking to fellow historians what are good books about the Classical World? Egypt, Rome and Greece.

[Anonymous No.13326036]

>>13322325
>So everything that is popular history is bad or just the thing that try to be "for dummies"?
Not necessarily. It's a good intro to history, but you shouldn't end there.

[Anonymous No.13326211]

>>13321897
Stop being Eurocentric.

[Anonymous No.13326383]

>>13326023
Literally my post above yours.

[Anonymous No.13326550]

Read anything from James clavell. Start with shogun and pick based on interest from there.

[Anonymous No.13326590]

There are no unbiased books on WWII? At least books with an effort not to be biased

[Anonymous No.13326785]

>>13321964
Read Fischer's "Albion's Seed" instead. It's a brick(just shy of 1000 pages), but as opposed to Zinn, Fischer actually makes a lot of sense and backs his ideas very, very well.

>>13326550
Julian Jackson's The Fall of France is great, if you're interested in more in-depth book on french interwar military then check "The Seeds of Disaster" by R. A. Doughty. One of the most bizarrely biased but also very well researched books on the topic of French campaign is probably Sixty days that shook the West by Jacques Benoist-Méchin. The only topic I really have knowledge on is that particular campaign and I can recommend a lot more, but I'd say Jackson and Doughty are enough to get a decent picture of it.

[Anonymous No.13326817]

>>13326785
meantt for >>13326590

[Anonymous No.13327540]

>>13321860
All you need.

[Anonymous No.13327637]

what's the most neutral book on Franco?

[Anonymous No.13328207]

[Anonymous No.13328315]

>>13328207
Great book, the narrative gets pretty confusing but that can't really be helped given the subject.

[Anonymous No.13328336]

>>13328207
Plz post more classic narrative survey books like this

I want more big fuckin MEATY history books to read that don't pull any punches

[Anonymous No.13328366]

>>13322063
Musashi
Taiko
Both by Eiji Yoshikawa

[Anonymous No.13328409]

>>13326023
Read the primary sources
For Greece
Herodotus
Thucydides
Xenophon

For Rome
Livy
Tacitus
Julius Caesar

Egypt I don't know about. There's probably some good books out there

[Anonymous No.13328439]

>>13328207
Literally came here to post this

[Anonymous No.13328652]

Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain and Red Famine

[Anonymous No.13328753]

>>13328652
Also The Harvest of Sorrow and The Great Terror by Robert Conquest if you want more books on the Soviet Union.

[Anonymous No.13328759]

>>13328207
I read most of this pretty dense but good shit. Might as well add the other one, which is much longer.

[Anonymous No.13328764]

>>13328336
>>13321860
Conquistador by Buddy Levy
River of Darkness by Buddy Levy
The Last Days of the Inca by Kim Mcquarry

All three are really good narrative style histories.

[Anonymous No.13328788]

>>13321860
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books

One of the few useful pages on reddit.

[Anonymous No.13328821]

>>13321860
The Hitler of History, John Lukacs

[Anonymous No.13328835]

Any good book recommendations or essays on historiography?

[Anonymous No.13328846]

>>13328788
>pop history

[Anonymous No.13328863]

>>13328835
I studied historiography for a long time and my advice is, if you have a serious philosophical bent, you will find historians exhausting and you'll especially find most writings on historiography to be philosophically unreflexive and annoying, because you'll be doing the "work" in your head to meet the text on its own terms without realizing it's not doing the same work to clarify those terms.

If you are seriously philosophically engaged, just learn about the history of history-writing with a primary focus on German historicism, and then segue into Dilthey-era hermeneutics, then learn enough hermeneutic phenomenology to understand Gadamer and Ricoeur. Everything else can be read as an OK diversion.

Another protip: Don't get bogged down in the Annales school. It was never philosophically very impressive, but idiot historians will sell it you like it was, so you spend months reading for methodological reflexivity that doesn't exist.

Georg Iggers is good. Metahistory is still good as long as you take it as a set of heuristics and reflections, and not as some kind of iron-clad system. If you have a basic understanding of the epistemology of historicism already, you can probably just go straight to Gadamer's Truth and Method and Ricoeur's Rule of Metaphor & Time and Narrative.

If you want something quaint and pleasant to start with, Collingwood's Autobiography is a classic. He's kind of like a more-Diltheyan-than-Dilthey Diltheyan.

[Anonymous No.13328886]

>>13328863
>Don't get bogged down in the Annales school. It was never philosophically very impressive
Kill yourself. Braudel is my hero.

[Anonymous No.13328897]

>>13328886
Braudel was not only a bad thinker and a mediocre historian, he was a cunt on a personal level.

[Anonymous No.13328904]

>>13328897
Whatever you say brainlet. You're just butthurt because he wasn't a Marxist historian.

[Anonymous No.13328911]

>>13328863
>>13328886
>>13328897
what are you guys even talking about?

[Anonymous No.13328950]

>>13328904
If you knew anything about historiography you would have accused me of being an atavistic historicist and conservative, a more likely and biting insult given my earlier post. Anyway, here's a reference for your Annalistes vs. Marxism crusade if that's what you're looking for.

>>13328911
Fernand Braudel, a celebrity intellectual historian in the '60s and '70s whose disciples wanted to turn history into graphs and spreadsheets put together by computer technicians.

[Anonymous No.13328981]

>>13326023
>Rome
Edward Gibbon

[Anonymous No.13329105]

Highly recommend Carroll Quigley's Tragedy & Hope and The Anglo-American Establishment.

>>13324548
>Will Durant
Good choice.

[Anonymous No.13329126]

A pretty good general survey that's fairly academic. Also Bede is kinda fun if you want primary sources.

[Anonymous No.13329138]

>>13328846
Not all popular history book are bad, but a good exception would be Guns, Germs, and Steel.

>Aboriginals are smarter than Europeans because I saw one working on a machine once and when I went hunting with them I had no idea what I was doing

>IQ tests are biased because they have a largely cultural component

>discredits every science that doesn't have studies he can cherry pick to fit his narrative and just comes off as an SJW mentioning the word "racist" at least 20 times in the prologue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvaxPH3ftUQ

[rolling No.13329448]

>>13322076
Your pissant nation has only been around for 200 years my nigger, Russia has had extensive ties to western Europe for more than a millennia.

[rolling No.13329459]

>>13328788
Bad post. Askhistorians is a legitimately good subreddit, and there are tons of great book recommendations to be had if you read through threads. However, the booklist they've put together is abysmal, tons of pop his, poorly written narratives, extremely limited scope etc etc. That list is worthless.

[Anonymous No.13329474]

Good books to learn about and understand Otto von Bismarck?

[Anonymous No.13329477]

>>13329138
Guns Germs and Steel is actually a great book that is worth reading as long as you have some thoughts of your own. The chapters on cultivation of food, development of societal structures, the links between territorial expansion and available crops, development of writing and so on are of great benefit. Even if he does trail off into his own fantasyland at times there is a lot of value to be found within.

[Anonymous No.13329498]

How is Durant’s Story of Civilization? I read the introduction and am willing to commit to the first 3 books. But I can’t find any major criticisms on him. Anything completely misleading from him? Also, should I read Herodotus Thucydides Livy etc. before or after Durant?

[Anonymous No.13329518]

Any books by ken follet will give a good grip of the midevil times.

[Anonymous No.13329521]

The entire History of civilization, should i be fine with Asimov?

Also any rec for Soviet history?

[Anonymous No.13329544]

>>13328652
This is a based book as well

[Anonymous No.13329628]

>>13329521
For a one volume book Geoffrey Hosking is pretty decent, though you wont understand soviet history without first reading a lot about tsarism. Of course you can always go for the simple bluepilled american style moralist literature written by kikes in an attempt to camouflage their own extensive involvement in those processes.
>>13329544
>>13328652
>>13328753

[Anonymous No.13329631]

>>13321897
I enjoyed "The Last Duel" quite a bit when I read it years ago. Not particularly big on medieval history though.

[Anonymous No.13329679]

>>13329628
>Still butthurt because genocide is callet out

[Anonymous No.13329712]

>>13328950
Annales School is shit but I think the guy in that pic is just overthinking it.

[Anonymous No.13329760]

Alistair Horne is always a good read.

[Anonymous No.13329878]

>>13322076
I think he means what people actually mean when they say "the west", which is Christendom.

[Anonymous No.13329906]

Midnight in Chernobyl was great but depressing.

[Anonymous No.13329908]

>>13321860
Not really a history book, but a good way to get an understanding of how and why history happened (on a grand scale).

[Anonymous No.13329914]

>>13328950
Marxist history is just as useful to understanding the world, as Marxist labour theory is to understanding the value of products.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!/qKRybJPyoB No.13329958]

>>13329138
>IQ tests are biased because they have a largely cultural component
This is correct though.
>...cherry pick
Hahahaha. Not unlike that bell curve shit they trot in here from time to time.

[Anonymous No.13329968]

>>13329958
>have a largely cultural component
I never hear anyone say that about other standardized tests, why is that?

[Anonymous No.13329971]

>>13323643
>read history to make a historicism

[Anonymous No.13329982]

Start with the Greeks

[Anonymous No.13331497]

>>13329498
I was the one who posted Will Durant earlier. I have read the first three books in the Civilization series, and I can honestly say that it is profound beyond belief and is not really a “history” by timeline, and an examination of the society and how the people lived. Only really in Caesar and Christ did he began a history of Rome, but that was because he used the emperors to explain how the society of Rome evolved. Truly a masterpiece in research. He and his wife genuinely knew everything there was to know about history, philosophy, and society.

[Anonymous No.13331532]

[Anonymous No.13331546]

[Anonymous No.13332106]

>>13321860
Read no historical book published after 1950. The cancer of progressive politics and the corruption of academia began not long afterward.
>>13329908
No. This book has been utterly demolished and is a crime against learning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvaxPH3ftUQ

[Anonymous No.13332533]

I'd recommend The Great Cat Massacre.

[Anonymous No.13332587]

>>13331546
is this about volkisch japs?

[Anonymous No.13332964]

>>13329968
Because it's trivially obvious, I imagine

[Anonymous No.13333632]

>>13332587
Japanese buddhist compliance with Japan's imperial project. Shows how every prominent zen master of the time (D.T. Suzuki) was a champion for japanese militarism.
Show's the insane mental gymnastics that japanese monks would do to justify japanese warmongering and atrocities.

[Anonymous No.13333936]

>>13329105
>in our time
what time is that?

[Anonymous No.13333944]

Neutral book on the Spanish civil war?

[Anonymous No.13333957]

>>13329908
>guns, memes and steel
Probably one of the most misleading history books there is.

[Anonymous No.13333973]

>>13321860


Capetian France 987-1328 2nd Edition - E. Hallam & J. Everard

The Making of the Middle Ages - Southern

The Crusades - Thomas Asbridge

Abelard, A Medieval Life - M.T. Clanchy

Millennium - Tom Holland

The Dark Ages - Charles Oman (this is public domain 1899, good organization but dense and uses old names for people, you wont see "charlemagne" or "clovis" in this.)


The Valois - Robert Knecht

The Normans - Folio Society (somewhat advanced, and I dont know of a non-folio edition)

Vladimir the Russian Viking - Vladimir Volkoff

*Any of the Oxhord British history series is good*

The Greatest Knight, the life of William Marshal - Thomas Asbridge

Summer of Blood - Dan Jones

[Anonymous No.13333997]

>>13333973
also, pick some pop history book on the byzantines. Oman's book covers them, but you miss the importance of the Makedon dynasty a little too much imo. Oman is dense, but since its such a large time period is basically a connecting overview, not enough explanation.

[Anonymous No.13334043]

How are these books?
>Weimar - Erich Weitz
>O Jerusalem - Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins

[Anonymous No.13334098]

Cannot recommend this book enough. IMO this is the definitive biography of the man and this is coming from someone who has read Lacouture's work.

[Anonymous No.13334114]

>>13329958
IQ tests without culturally loaded questions actually exacerbate the disparity in results

[Anonymous No.13334120]

>>13321860
>Feudal Society vol i&ii by Marc Bloch
>Journeyer by Gary Jenning (also Aztec)
>History of The Ancient World (also of the Medieval World) by Susan Wise Bauer
>Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel

All good shit, even the fiction by Jenning

[Anonymous No.13334128]

Currently reading Macaulay's History of England
it's pretty fucking dry bros

[Anonymous No.13334224]

>>13329477
Yeah, but those ideas have to be in better books that focus on those subjects though. There is just so much junk info in that Guns, Germs, and steel that i would definitely warn people from it. I would even argue he doesnt understand domestication amongst many other things. The one guy attacked it for being anti-rascist but there is so much more to it being wrong than its political bent. He says so many things that just arent true, and twists ideas to make a easily understandable narrative for the reader. He is honestly everything wrong with pop history.

[Anonymous No.13334238]

>>13329477
>The chapters on cultivation of food, development of societal structures, the links between territorial expansion and available crops, development of writing and so on are of great benefit
Nigger this shit is all made up fake stuff, lmao. Go read an actual book and you'll find out.

[Anonymous No.13334244]

>>13329878
t. Russian, Latino, Ethiopian or American

[Anonymous No.13334266]

>>13334128
I remember reading Macaulay's account of a magistrate who would "roar at defendants from the bench" and cried laughing for hours at the mental image. Plus I liked Macaulay's voice. Churchill cited Macaulay as a major influence on his writing style.

[Anonymous No.13334273]

>>13323643
this desu

[Anonymous No.13334830]

anon you are kidding yourself if you think that you're going to get one definitive, unbiased history of the Spanish civil war in one book. You're going to need to read two at min. I'll take a look to see if I have any thst I can reccomend though.

Can we have more of these threads in the future occasionally? Way more productive and comfy than /his

[Anonymous No.13334846]

>>13321860
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn

Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error

[Anonymous No.13334920]

Anybody got any recommendations on early medieval England? I'm thinking from the end of Roman rule to 1066.

[Anonymous No.13335012]

>>13334920
Peter Ackroyd's The History of England is very enjoyable, just don't read the Kindle editions, the formatting for them is trash.

[Anonymous No.13335221]

>>13328981
I hear that is outdated, but I would honestly love to see his take.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!/qKRybJPyoB No.13335239]

>>13335221
It may miss what modern scholars have, but it makes up for in lovely prose.
It's one of the only works that are fine in abridgment.

[Anonymous No.13335274]

Tragedy and Hope

[Anonymous No.13335291]

>>13326023
For Rome, I'd suggest Peter Heathers' The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome and the Barbarians. It's an easy enough read that relies more on archeological evidence than Enlightenment era misinformation. Only read Gibbon if you are interested in historiography and not actual Roman history.

[Anonymous No.13335300]

>>13335291
IDK, If I trust someone who argues there were no social or moral issues at the end of Rome.

[Anonymous No.13336551]

Give me 100 to 200 pages long books about specific points in the following eras
>Coexistence of Greeks, Romans and Egyptians
>Ancient Mesopotamia
>Conquistadors

[Anonymous No.13336570]

>>13329448
so has turkey.

[Anonymous No.13336576]

>>13333944

I don't know what stance he takes but I plan on reading Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War over summer when I'm in Spain looks like it is detailed very well.

[Anonymous No.13336580]

Is there any value in aimlessly reading Old Newspapers and Magazines on Archive dot org? As a writer will i discover something good and then proceed to write the next picaresque Pynchonian fiction?? I really want to do that.

[Anonymous No.13336659]

>>13334920
The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England by Henry Mayr-Harting is really good. It's a little dense and only really goes up to the 9th century but it's really worthwhile.

[Anonymous No.13336879]

>>13336580
When I researched my history capstone paper, I found reading through newspapers fun. I got solid primary sources that are probably not existant in most books about my subject, and I got to read fun irrelevant stories in newspapers in between (My professor admitted to doing this too). It won't make you a God, but I found it very worthwhile.

[Anonymous No.13337543]

>>13321860
this is all great but how does one read history?

[Anonymous No.13338295]

>>13328207
Absolutely based I'd recommend Trevor-Ropers essays as well if you like the early modern period

[Anonymous No.13339431]

>>13321964
way too many normalfags love that book. i can't believe its worth reading since that is the case

[Anonymous No.13339523]

>>13335300
Why would you trust someone like Gibbon who was so ass blasted by his contemporaries calling him a smooth brain that he went and wrote Vindication, which is just page after page of him bitching about how he was being unfairly maligned without addressing most of the criticism levied at him?

[Anonymous No.13339669]

>>13321860
anyone know any good book about pre-Marian Reform Roman Wars? The Samnite Wars or The Punic Wars?
Maniple tactics Rome is really piquing my interest right now.

[Anonymous No.13339746]

>>13335221
Not that outdated. It's pretty much a meme people just repeat.

[Anonymous No.13340218]

Anyone got any recommendation for the English Civil War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms? I'm currently reading The English Civil war by Diane Purkiss and I find the period incredibly fascinating.

[Anonymous No.13340293]

>>13339523
I never said I trusted Gibbon...

[Anonymous No.13340952]

Anyone mention Jared Diamond yet? His work is pretty insightful.

Mary Beard too.

[Anonymous No.13341151]

>>13340952
>Mary Beard too.
"no"

[Anonymous No.13341171]

>>13340952
Is that the guns germs and steel guy? That book doesn’t really go into all the reasons, I wouldn’t trust anything else he has put out if that’s his best.

[Anonymous No.13341514]

>>13339669
I’m about to read Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Punic Wars.

[Anonymous No.13341619]

>>13329138
And who could ever forget
>zebras cant be domesticated

[Anonymous No.13342757]

>>13341514
>Adrian Goldsworthy
I just started reading his "How Rome Fell"

[Anonymous No.13342829]

>>13329138
And despite that there are still people who hate him and call this book racist. Those people's brains are beyond rotten, it's a pity.