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History books that caused a big change in perspective for you
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James Brown
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Cheerful Charlie
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Will Durant's 11 volume series. The Story of Civilization. Especially the rise of the Enlightenment. At a very young age I read H. G. Well's Outline of History, and read a lot of history in our set of encyclopedias. I attended school in Tulsa Oklahoma and the history taught to me as a boy I know recognize was surprisingly progressive and truthful, not shy about telling on wrongs committee to the American Indians, probably teaching that would not past muster in today's conservative age. All of this early experience taught me to value and appreciate history from a progressive viewpoint.
What'd you think of this set overall? I've heard of it but never checked it out. Strikes me as a set that may have more text than necessary.
Bomb#20
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A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, by Winston Churchill
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Have you read them?
Cheerful Charlie
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It is a good basic history from ancient times to early modern times. You cannot cover that time span in a small amount of text. Today's historians fault it as being somewhat simplistic, but it gives one a good basic overview of history, especially for young people interested in history. It was offered in book of the month clubs cheap and so ended up in used book stores cheap and easy to find, where is where I got mine. I enjoyed them very much. I still have a few volumes around here. They are a good way to familiarize oneself with the overall history of mankind. Then one can move on to more scholarly books if one desires, or more in depth histories of a specific area.
Amazon has the set in a Kindle edition.
Bomb#20
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All four volumes, when I was in high school, on the school bus. That guy was a great writer.
That kind of history is something I had an interest in a few years ago. I actually bought The Penguin History of the World when I was just getting into history although didn't get too far through it.
I always found thick books with lots of text a slog to get through and ended up focusing more on concise books written on specific periods. These days I seem to have pieced it all together that way, along with Maps of Time which I mention in the OP *really* pulling it all together in a way I didn't expect.
David Loewen's Lies Across America. Made me realize the extent of the still-present neoconfederate influence in the US, among other things.
Rob
Rob
Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. It presents world history from the perspective of Persia, the stans, and other Middle Eastern territories. Europe is seen as something of a backwater throughout much of recorded history. This region is see as the focus of attention for human civilization because of its position as a crossroads or linchpin between the eastern and western spheres of human activity.
Beer With Straw
Member
It wasn't a book, it was a transcript of the Clark University Lectures by Sigmund Freud: https://www.rasch.org/over.htm
It was "an historical survey of the origin and further development of this new method of research and cure" and because it was so damned old, I went seeking modern correlation.
A lot of people are iffy about Freud but he is still regarded as a great influence on psychology https://www.google.ca/search?q=most...-b-ab&gfe_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=0BMeWoXwE8efXuPLr7gJ
It was "an historical survey of the origin and further development of this new method of research and cure" and because it was so damned old, I went seeking modern correlation.
A lot of people are iffy about Freud but he is still regarded as a great influence on psychology https://www.google.ca/search?q=most...-b-ab&gfe_rd=cr&dcr=0&ei=0BMeWoXwE8efXuPLr7gJ
T.G.G. Moogly
Traditional Atheist
Guns Germs and Steel, the Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. His followup, Collapse, was almost as good.
Hermit
Cantankerous grump
E.P Thompson The Making of the English Working Class
Albert Soboul The French Revolution 1787-1799
R.H. Tawney Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
E.H. Carr What is History?
F. Stern (ed.) The Varieties of History
a.o.
Most of all, though, the first history book I read after I wangled myself into the UoS's arts faculty (Thank you, Gough Whitlam, you egomaniacal, brilliant and charismatic dreamer), Peter Gay's The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Circumstances were, as I hinted, rather fortuitous. Added to them was the fact that the history department forbade noobs to take modern history courses. I lost all my gruntles over that fact at the time, and chose the closest available thing among the options available in what was called Early Modern Europe. The course was The Fall of the Ancien Régime, and in hindsight the department's prohibition was well advised. Before the end of the first semester all my gruntles, and then some, had returned. Once I picked up Gay's book (two volumes,actually), I could hardly put it back down. I read it while eating my rolled oats, travelling on the bus, I took it to bed with me, scribbling notes, inserting oodles of annotated bookmarks and returning to pages I had read a few days earlier. By the time I had digested it I had become convinced that people cannot fully understand modern history unless they had familiarised themselves with periods leading up to it, preferably starting in ancient Greece, which is where Gay regularly referred back to. I also understood then that not a lot of historical understanding can be gained from learning who did what to whom when and why, unless that is accompanied by knowledge of what people thought of themselves and their environment, the Zeitgeist pertaining at the time, I suppose, and that is not so much a matter of empirical historiography.
Albert Soboul The French Revolution 1787-1799
R.H. Tawney Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
E.H. Carr What is History?
F. Stern (ed.) The Varieties of History
a.o.
Most of all, though, the first history book I read after I wangled myself into the UoS's arts faculty (Thank you, Gough Whitlam, you egomaniacal, brilliant and charismatic dreamer), Peter Gay's The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Circumstances were, as I hinted, rather fortuitous. Added to them was the fact that the history department forbade noobs to take modern history courses. I lost all my gruntles over that fact at the time, and chose the closest available thing among the options available in what was called Early Modern Europe. The course was The Fall of the Ancien Régime, and in hindsight the department's prohibition was well advised. Before the end of the first semester all my gruntles, and then some, had returned. Once I picked up Gay's book (two volumes,actually), I could hardly put it back down. I read it while eating my rolled oats, travelling on the bus, I took it to bed with me, scribbling notes, inserting oodles of annotated bookmarks and returning to pages I had read a few days earlier. By the time I had digested it I had become convinced that people cannot fully understand modern history unless they had familiarised themselves with periods leading up to it, preferably starting in ancient Greece, which is where Gay regularly referred back to. I also understood then that not a lot of historical understanding can be gained from learning who did what to whom when and why, unless that is accompanied by knowledge of what people thought of themselves and their environment, the Zeitgeist pertaining at the time, I suppose, and that is not so much a matter of empirical historiography.
If you don't mind me asking, in what ways did Gay connect modern history with Ancient Greece?
Hermit
Cantankerous grump
He did not write about modern history. The book is about The Enlightenment period, so approximately from the early 17th (Bacon) to the late 18th (Goethe) century. The connection consists of the extent to which the philosophes drew on the writers of classical Greece.
Sorry, misread you there. Makes sense. I'd be curious to know what the major ideas taken from the Ancient period were. Might be a question for the philosophy stack exchange.
Hermit
Cantankerous grump
Montesquieu would be a good start. He developed the theory of the separation of powers. Probably the most frequently quoted writer among the mob that formulated the US constitution. As a group the philosophers of the Enlightenment were probably the chief facilitators of the transition from rule by divine right to democracy, and they were immensely influential in many other respects, I hope you realise that Adam Smith is included in that group, as is John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and the openly atheistic Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach.
Thanks but our signals got crossed there, I was referring to Ancient Greece and what was carried over from it to Enlightenment philosophers. Interesting post, though.