publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.ml/post/26991234
Any era is welcome but I’m especially interested in modern history.
I know that having just one book which talks about the history of the whole world would be difficult but let’s see if you guys know something (series are welcomed suggestions too).
I very much enjoyed James C Scott’s against the grain, which follows the first sedentary societies around the world.
Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything was a fun read. And concise. Fast review here ruins nothing.
For US history, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been excellent. I’m 94% of the way through. I love that this book has spawned an entire education project.
I’m due a re-read of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. It’s not strictly a historical account, but it certainly casts a different light on late 20th c. and early 21st c. history.
I would be remiss if I did not include the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. This was one of the most important reads of my last 10 years. Again, not strictly history, but a lens on history.
Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan was also excellent, about the peace conference that ended the Great War.
If you’re really on about the period in Europe between 1945 and 2005, though, I have to recommend Postwar by Tony Judt.
Maybe not where you want to start, but I ended up loving David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari gives a very macro view of how societies became what they are today and about humans in general :)
(though worth noting it’s one guy’s oversimiplified opinion and most historians would call it wildly innaccurate)
The best way to read history is just go to pick out random histories and non-fiction that appeal to you and dive in. The connections and general overview will form naturally as you go.
For me, I like to read professional authors who are amateur historians rather than the other way round. “Guns of August” by Tuchman would be an excellent example.
I read a book called Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond which was quite good. It explores why certain civilisations were able to conquer others
I’m glad you enjoyed the book, and I hope it led to further reading. It comes with a list of caveats a mile long from other historians and anthropologists. Engaging, yes, but I would dispute it meets the “accuracy” criterion OP laid out.
For those unaware, Diamond’s book attempts to explain the disparity of power and wealth between European cultures and the rest of the world. Thankfully, he explicitly rejects any argument based upon inherent white supremacy, so that’s good. Since that old chestnut is off limits, though, he has to find a different paradigm to explain the disparity. To that end, he argued that the environmental factors of the European continent made it so any other outcome was practically impossible. The handful of geographical advantages afforded to those early civilizations compounded upon themselves time and time again, inevitably resulting in European hegemony.
On its face, it’s an argument that makes some degree of sense, especially if your world history education is already predisposed to a Eurocentric view. Due to the book’s success, it has been the subject of a lot of rebuttals and counter-arguments from other scholars. It’s worth perusing some of that scholarship if you found Diamond’s arguments interesting or compelling.
I suppose if you try and distil any history down into a single unified theory it’s gonna have caveats. Yes, the world is infinitely more complex than the simplistic version he creates, but I think the broad strokes are there. If nothing else it’s a jumping off point to get people interested in the evolution of civilisations and will hopefully encourage people to follow up with their own research.
I’m always a fan of Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. Been 20 years since I read it and I still think about some of the stories in that tome
Yes.
