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Hey folks! The thread for this year's Secret Santa book exchange is now live! Sign-ups are open til December 1st! Send a stranger a tome on the Franco-Prussian War or the excavation of Mohenjo-daro! Join today!
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Nov 2, 2025 23:41
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FPyat posted:Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua Freeman got me through some shifts.
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Nov 6, 2025 01:02
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It's one of those books I listened to primarily because it was available for free from my local library's e-service. Got me to read a lot of books I otherwise would have skipped over.
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Nov 6, 2025 03:02
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halfway through The Invisible Bridge and it's just as enjoyable and rich with information as Before the Storm and Nixonland. like seriously, this series is fun to burn through. I do think Nixon is far more interesting than Reagan so I can see how Reagan's showmanship and hunky-dory storytelling can be boring compared to Nixon's neurosis. based on a comment by Perlstein there is no more of the series after his fourth entry. He's done. ending at 1980 makes sense.
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Nov 9, 2025 16:47
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As research for something I'm writing I started reading "Norway's War: A People’s Struggle Against Nazi Tyranny, 1940–45" https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/norways-war-9781801104845/ It's scary and inspiring stuff. But it's also darkly hilarious. The fascists built up the idea of Norwegian people as the perfect Aryans, heirs of the Vikings who they idolized. And then they invaded Norway and met a people that were totally uninterested in accepting their "racial destiny" and tried to undermine them at every turn. The one would-be leader who wholeheartedly endorsed National Socialism, Vidkun Quisling, was by all accounts completely lacking in charisma and the Germans suffered whenever they had to deal with him. They tried to draft young Norwegian men and turn them into a force to be reckoned with, thinking they just needed a bit of time to accept their true selves, and instead found the troops whined endlessly. When the Germans complained about how much the Norwegians were complaining and asked for permission to discipline them they were told by Nazi high command "well you must understand you're dealing with aristocrats of the Aryan world. You need to treat them better." It's a huge farce in the middle of a horrific situation.
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Nov 11, 2025 03:18
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I’ve been reading A History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium as an introduction Roman / Ancient European culture and would love to read some primary sources along side it. Greek, Latin, and anything else of the era. Any recommendations for a primary source collection? Something similar to the quality of Sources of Chinese Tradition would be preferred but not required.
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Nov 11, 2025 18:29
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Miracle Box posted:I’ve been reading A History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium as an introduction Roman / Ancient European culture and would love to read some primary sources along side it. Greek, Latin, and anything else of the era. Any recommendations for a primary source collection? Something similar to the quality of Sources of Chinese Tradition would be preferred but not required. As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History is a good place to look for Roman primary sources on social history.
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Nov 11, 2025 20:27
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From a South Korean perspective I've always been curious about how people inhabited non-communist dictatorships in the 20th century. Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco's Spain, 1939-1975 is painting a dreary picture of life under a regime that was ideologically pro-rich and anti-poor to a level unthinkable in the United States. Good corrective to what appear to be increasingly pro-Franco opinions on the Right these days.quote:In the rest of the country to have a job, even a stable one in what used to be elite employment, did not guarantee escape from misery and humiliation. Rail workers, who had a strong tradition of left-wing union militancy, were notoriously ill treated by the state-owned company RENFE. They were subjected to military-style discipline and harsh punishment if they stepped out of line. Since RENFE employees were often working while exhausted and used old machinery, deadly accidents became commonplace. So ruthless, however, was company discipline that, as a matter of course, workers were assumed to have caused these accidents. They were imprisoned as soon as the accident happened and for the period of the investigation, which could take years to complete. Suicide was not uncommon among those fearing arrest.
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Nov 13, 2025 11:08
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CrypticFox posted:As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History is a good place to look for Roman primary sources on social history. Thank you! This is just what I was looking for.
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Nov 18, 2025 01:08
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I've been on a Tamerlane kick recently. Any recommendations for a book/biography about him?
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Nov 20, 2025 01:00
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:halfway through The Invisible Bridge and it's just as enjoyable and rich with information as Before the Storm and Nixonland. like seriously, this series is fun to burn through. I do think Nixon is far more interesting than Reagan so I can see how Reagan's showmanship and hunky-dory storytelling can be boring compared to Nixon's neurosis. My favorite in the series. Love the way he positions Reagan as the devil waiting in the wings at the end of most chapters. I'm glad he's stopping as his more contemporary takes are not very good or insightful, though I'd expect he'd have a great Gingrich/1994 book in him. Found this thread because I've finally decided to start the Caro LBJ books that have been on my shelf for a while now. About halfway through The Path to Power and it's very funny at times just how loathsome LBJ is as a human.
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Nov 21, 2025 20:40
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Reminder: this year's Book Barn Secret Santa is open for sign-ups until Monday! Send someone your favourite biography of a doomed revolutionary, or a sweeping epic on the Byzantines!
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Nov 26, 2025 19:40
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Thinking about picking up Wellington: Years of the Sword after Bernard Cornwell's recommendation. Noticed it was written in 1969 though. Anything more recent / better on the same topic, or is that still the best read?
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Nov 29, 2025 22:08
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Before I go down search engine rabbit holes, are there any go-to books on England's occupations in Africa between the crimean war and the first world war from the perspective of a soldier on the ground. Some kind of Storm of Steel or Goodbye to All That of the Boer/Zulu Wars.
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Dec 7, 2025 16:06
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Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” is such a slow read. It’s 150ish pages without a section break, just unmarked transitions between thoughts. I’ve been reading about the French Revolution and thought it be educational to read some of those old important books. de Tocqueville was way more readable. Complaint over.
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Dec 10, 2025 01:03
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I had a great time making my way through it - just vastly more intellectually stimulating than any of the current events commentary I can read today.
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Dec 10, 2025 02:42
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lifg posted:Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” is such a slow read. It’s 150ish pages without a section break, just unmarked transitions between thoughts. I’ve been reading about the French Revolution and thought it be educational to read some of those old important books. de Tocqueville was way more readable. I'd love to have your thoughts on de Tocqueville, he's cited in a truly horrendous essay I just wrote up for a DnD thread, but I didn't read the whole book while I was trying to summarize his views.
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Dec 11, 2025 11:37
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Discendo Vox posted:I'd love to have your thoughts on de Tocqueville, he's cited in a truly horrendous essay I just wrote up for a DnD thread, but I didn't read the whole book while I was trying to summarize his views. He’s reacting against some current thought of his time on what the revolution was all about, and I had fun sussing that out. He has a larger argument that the whole thing was just inevitable due to historical forces, which I don’t believe, and he had a simplified view of a hard split between the social classes, a view which I think has fallen out of favor. But next to that was a ton of insight into the nature of feudal systems, how destroying it centralized power, how the revolutionaries were less anti-clerical than anti-other-people-having-power, and a lot. It’s a lot of stuff that I don’t have enough knowledge to judge the correctness of, but it’s useful enough that I’ll be thinking about it in my next D&D campaign. And if that’s not the most déclassé thing I’ve ever said I don’t know what is.
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Dec 11, 2025 23:09
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lifg posted:Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” is such a slow read. It’s 150ish pages without a section break, just unmarked transitions between thoughts. I’ve been reading about the French Revolution and thought it be educational to read some of those old important books. de Tocqueville was way more readable.  Burke's point that the old regime was stable and viable and should have been preserved is vaguely amusing when the old regime produced Louis the 16th, who utterly failed to protect the regime. Blaming the Freemasons and philosophers for the chaos is nice, but it doesn't excuse the utter failure of said regime to preserve itself. If you want to read something better by a French 19th-century historian, I would read Thiers over Tocqueville, I am not particularly a fan of Adolphe Thiers' actions in French history, but his History of the French Revolution is actually a book about the French Revolution. Burke is just a conservative who sounds afraid to end up on a guillotine, or, for a more modern comparison, killed in Central Park by Bernie bros.
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Dec 11, 2025 23:46
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Toplowtech posted:It would be both more accurate to the nature of his reaction and history if his reflections were an audiobook read by Alex Jones tbh. Holy moly. Is that really Burke's take? That's wild. Given the economic crises and scandals that precipitated the regime's collapse just at the very end, to say nothing of the unsustainable systemic problems with it in the long term, calling that regime, at that time, "stable" is a hell of a take.
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Dec 12, 2025 11:22
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Edmund Burke posted:Your government in France, though usually, and I think justly, reputed the best of the unqualified or ill-qualified monarchies, was still full of abuses. These abuses accumulated in a length of time, as they must accumulate in every monarchy not under the constant inspection of a popular representative. I am no stranger to the faults and defects of the subverted government of France; and I think I am not inclined by nature or policy to make a panegyric upon anything which is a just and natural object of censure. But the question is not now of the vices of that monarchy, but of its existence. Is it, then, true, that the French government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of reform, so that it was of absolute necessity the whole fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the erection of a theoretic, experimental edifice in its place? All France was of a different opinion in the beginning of the year 1789. The instructions to the representatives to the States-General, from every district in that kingdom, were filled with projects for the reformation of that government, without the remotest suggestion of a design to destroy it. Had such a design been then even insinuated, I believe there would have been but one voice, and that voice for rejecting it with scorn and horror. Men have been sometimes led by degrees, sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they never would have permitted the most remote approach. When those instructions were given, there was no question but that abuses existed, and that they demanded a reform: nor is there now. In the interval between the instructions and the Revolution things changed their shape; and in consequence of that change, the true question at present is, whether those who would have reformed or those who have destroyed are in the right.
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Dec 12, 2025 12:10
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Toplowtech posted:
What's the opinion on Peter Kropotkin's The Great French Revolution? I've tried to dive into it a few times but got distracted by other life things.
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Dec 12, 2025 15:18
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Jules Michelet is the most fun to read of the 19th century historians on the french revolution, in my opinion.
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Dec 12, 2025 15:47
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Railing Kill posted:Holy moly. Is that really Burke's take? That's wild. Given the economic crises and scandals that precipitated the regime's collapse just at the very end, to say nothing of the unsustainable systemic problems with it in the long term, calling that regime, at that time, "stable" is a hell of a take. "In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority." Seriously, Burke's position is not rocket science: the system favors me/us happy few, so why loving change it? If you change it, DOOOOM. Also can my kids bury me in a secret place? I don't want Jacobins to have fun with my corpse if they ever take over England. I wish he had lived until 1832, the whole reform act drama would probably have killed him.
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Dec 12, 2025 17:58
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Burke is the prototypical conservative for a reason: in theory willing to endorse the idea of gradual change based on how great gradual changes from the past were because they created the world in which he's rich, comfortable, and powerful; in practice opposed to just about any new change no matter how gradual because even small changes to the status quo might threaten his position and status.
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Dec 12, 2025 22:09
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vyelkin posted:Burke is the prototypical conservative for a reason: in theory willing to endorse the idea of gradual change based on how great gradual changes from the past were because they created the world in which he's rich, comfortable, and powerful; in practice opposed to just about any new change no matter how gradual because even small changes to the status quo might threaten his position and status.  If you listened to those 'thinkers, you would believe France was Persia or Turkey(those animals!), but they aren't, so surely France can't be that bad. Because you are either the infidels/barbarians or okay, there is no middle ground. So it's despotism rather in appearance than in reality." Things the King of France could still do in the 1780s that no King of England could do since John Lackland(13th century): arrest people with a signature for any reason (or none) exile whole families then distribute their wealth, because they bother him, a friend or are rich or lent him money "ignore" most parliaments in France(okay some english king tried that after John, i wonder how it went) "Yeah, it sure looks like, smells like, and moves like despotism. But is it? And will I mention any of those problems? No, "said the rich englishman, "I would rather bitch about other things like the numbers of representatives in the tiers etat, all while hyping the English model." 
Toplowtech fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Dec 12, 2025 |
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Dec 12, 2025 22:40
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Anyone have any good books on Brazilian history? I'd take any period, a general survey, whatever.
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Dec 20, 2025 17:05
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Very glad to be reading Peter McPhee's A Social History of France, 1780-1914, given how limited the books on the revolution I've read have been at describing its social impact and long-term consequences for the population.
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Dec 22, 2025 05:39
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I think I'm gonna try and do some sort of writing (in Swedish) on the Babylonian Exile, an event that fascinates me in its lasting legacy in the Bible. But my knowledge comes from a general morass of Biblical history texts; does anyone know a good book for a focused look at it?
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Dec 28, 2025 20:26
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Any good, broad histories of the Indian subcontinent? Ideally on audible? Especially kind of pre-history up to the Raj? I’m realizing I know basically nothing about it before the EIC except ‘there was en empire called the Mughals and I think they are related to the Mongols’ but I have no real idea who/what was going on before the Mughals, what the Mughals really did, and why they declined and fell etc.
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Jan 6, 2026 17:45
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Audrey Trutschke just wrote a new one volume. Haven't read it yet.
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Jan 6, 2026 17:52
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John Keay had a single volume history of India, it's on my shelf although I haven't read it yet.
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Jan 6, 2026 18:52
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man
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Ccs posted:As research for something I'm writing I started reading "Norway's War: A People’s Struggle Against Nazi Tyranny, 1940–45" After reading this I moved on to the author's earlier book, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun Hamsun was a norwegian nobel prize winner in literature and had legions of fans during his lifetime. Supposedly Kafka, HG Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, and Isaac Bashevis Singer were big fans. His name popped up a few times in Ferguson's latest book because he was a severe anglophobe and a huge fan of Germany. This caused him to take some, uh, unfortunate positions during WW2 even while his country was being occupied. As Enigma explores, a lot of this was due to Hamsun receiving most of his money during his career from German translations of his books because the Norwegian market was too small to sustain a writer's living. He therefore felt Germany was the most cultured place in Europe and even identified himself as German over and over again in letters to friends. Meanwhile he hated Britain due to reports of British imperialism he had read as a boy and because of the imperious attitude of British tourists in Norway. Hamsun spent most of his life living in hotels while writing so he kept having run ins with rude British tourists. He also hated America although he went to live there twice during his life, working menial jobs on the prairies. He wrote a travel book "On the Cultural Life Of Modern America" in which he excoriated the country and its people. The book paints a nuanced but also pretty funny picture of the man. He was an autodidact who hated to be agreed with. He liked hanging out with socialists because he had fascist tendencies and could always get into arguments with them. He came from a peasant background but believed the world had "natural aristocrats" and complained that modernism was destroying the natural order where men knew their place and did work gladly with respect to their intrinsic betters. To that end he bullied his second wife into quitting her acting career to come work on a farm with him, since he felt that working the land was the only proper way for a person of his station to make a living (except he would then leave for long periods of time to live in hotels to write his books.) He saved his most vicious contempt for doctors and lawyers since he felt the middle class was "unnatural" and the world should be divided into aristocrats and serfs, but he also retained some respect for people who tried to change their station. Since he had also struggled throughout his entire life to transform himself from peasant to literary luminary. He also delivered a series of lectures about how writers should all be mistrusted, that there is no inherent value in writing, that writing is like a disease in the blood, and that if he could find a stable job he would give it up. He even wrote a book, "Shallow Soil", about a group of degenerate artists in Olso in the 1890s who cause incredible trouble for their businessmen friends. A particularly unscrupulous poet, Irgens, seduces both businessmen's wives. While the first woman to be seduced eventually returns to her husband, the second is younger and stays enraptured with him and the businessman commits suicide. Hamsun places himself in the book as a tutor named "Coldvein" who spends most of the book stalking the second lady and telling her not to hang out with the artists. When she eventually succumbs to Irgens, he takes a train back to the country and rips up the patriotic cloth bow that he wears, to mourn how the country is going to the wastrels. Truly a bonkers person.
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Jan 6, 2026 19:49
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