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Unfortunately I don't know a good book on this, but I'm pretty sure it's generally accepted that one major reason the Romans were playing barbarians off each other instead of fighting them was because by that point the bulk of the Roman military was being used infighting by various generals contesting to be emperor, since it's a lot easier to crown yourself emperor if you've got seven loyal legions hanging out in Rome, but oh no it turns out when you take those seven legions out of Gaul and Germany it leaves them undefended against external enemies. So any book you find might have to deal a lot with internal politics as well as foreign affairs of the empire if you want to get a complete picture.
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Dec 20, 2013 16:34
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radlum posted:I'm in an Italian history binge, and I'm interested in the Merchant Republics era, specially Venice, any good books about them? I read Roger Crowley's City of Fortune a year or two back and it's a good read. Not an academic history, so if that's what you're looking for then you'll want something with better documentation, but it's well-written and I learned a lot about Venetian history that I never knew.
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Feb 28, 2014 22:57
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Endman posted:Just ordered myself a copy of this: I read it for class. It's really good.
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Mar 17, 2014 12:32
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radlum posted:I'm about to finish Roger Crowley's City of Fortune as suggested here; I really liked it and now I'm interested in his other books, I'll be buying them later. Still, the book left me interested in other related topics, like medieval mercenaries, the other Merchant Republics and the Ottoman Empire, any book suggestions for those topics? As you might imagine, there is a lot published on the Ottoman Empire. I'm partial to Kinross's The Ottoman Centuries, but I haven't touched it in years and may just have fond memories because it's the first book I ever read on Ottoman history and probably the only dedicated Ottoman book in my collection. It's also a much broader book, in that it covers the Ottoman Empire from birth to death, so it may not be what you're looking for. I'm glad you liked City of Fortune though, it's really good.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:50
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Homemaster posted:On that note, what would be the best books to read on WW1? That's a pretty broad topic, any chance you're interested in a more specific aspect of it?
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Apr 11, 2014 22:48
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Homemaster posted:The history behind it ie how it began Guns of August is probably the most famous book on the outbreak of the war. Personally I can recommend The Sleepwalkers (Christopher Clark), it's just published last year and it's really good.
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Apr 11, 2014 23:14
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Does anyone have good suggestions for a history-related Book of the Month selection? Right now I'm thinking of including People's History of the United States in next month's poll but other suggestions would be good, especially since the ones I've been suggesting on my own (1491, etc.) don't seem to get many votes. Have you ever done King Leopold's Ghost? It's historical and also a hugely important book for its impact on how people think of colonialism. It's depressing as poo poo though.
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Apr 28, 2014 16:40
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TheFallenEvincar posted:I was definitely satisfied with Christopher Clark's books on Prussia and WW1, any recommendations for Tsarist/pre-Soviet Russian history? It's a huge topic, what specifically are you interested in?
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May 2, 2014 13:58
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Trujillo posted:Anyone have any good recommendations on the history of Sicily? Also looking for some about the history of Venice/Italian merchant republics in general. I recommended Roger Crowley's City of Fortune last time someone asked for a history of Venice, and apparently the person bought it and really enjoyed it, so there you go.
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May 22, 2014 17:54
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If you're interested in the Napoleonic Wars, Russia Against Napoleon by Dominic Lieven is very good.
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Jul 18, 2014 14:37
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Abu Dave posted:Anyone got any reccomendations for books about the Ottoman Empire? I've always liked Lord Kinross's The Ottoman Centuries as an overview of the entire history of the empire, but it's more because it's accessible. It's older so it won't represent the newest scholarship or anything.
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Jul 20, 2014 16:43
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Jedi425 posted:Nothing to Envy is a really interesting look into the lives of some ordinary North Koreans who later defected to the South. I finished it not too long ago and pretty much blew through it. It's more anecdotal than historical, though. I can second this, this is a phenomenal book if you're curious about everyday life in North Korea, especially during the famine in the 90s. It won't tell you much about Korean history farther back than the 90s that you couldn't find on Wikipedia though.
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Oct 5, 2014 14:07
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Balaeniceps posted:Not that I've read it but I've heard Misha Glenny's history of the Balkans: The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804-1999 is very good (and there are later editions with addenda to cover the time from 1999 to now). It is very good. But it's much more of a general history and I don't think would fit the OP's assignment since it covers so many different locations and events.
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Jan 23, 2015 14:41
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Be warned though that some people (myself included) really don't like Figes because he's a lovely human being who's been accused of making up sources in the past (or, at the very least, having inadequate documentation--i.e. someone followed his footnotes for a different book and they didn't back up his claims, or sometimes didn't even exist at all). Also he wrote Amazon reviews praising his own books and attacking competing books, and when someone called him out on it he said his wife did it. So yeah, in some Russian history circles Figes is a bit on the sketchy side, which is a shame because he's about as close to a celebrity as you get in Russian history. e: also if you want a really basic, not overly academic overview, I read Alexis Troubetzkoy's A Short History of the Crimean War a year or so ago and it's okay. Uses a lot of primary sources and focuses waaaaay more on the buildup than the war itself, but there's a lot of stuff about how competing British and Russian diplomats in Istanbul were influential in the outbreak of war so that may help if you're looking for stuff on the role of the Ottomans. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Feb 21, 2015 |
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Feb 21, 2015 14:44
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Wait, besides being an rear end in a top hat on Amazon what has Figes done that is so bad? I only really know of him through his wikipedia article which obviously doesn't say much There's also contentions that he made up sources for at least one book, The Whisperers, about how much Russians were scared of Stalin during his rule. One reviewer actually followed his footnotes and apparently they didn't back up a lot of his claims, and some of his footnotes pointed to sources or quotations that literally didn't exist. This apparently went so far as the actual title of his book, taken from a quote where someone said that everyone was so scared of Stalin and the NKVD that they would whisper in their own houses so that spies couldn't hear and denounce them. The reviewer said apparently this quote didn't exist in the place his footnote pointed, so his fabrications may have extended as far as the most important quote in his entire book, not just for minor stuff. That all being said, I haven't read the book myself or followed the footnotes, so this is all based on academic reputation and conversations I've had with people who followed this whole affair pretty closely. Figes writes good books but given his past you have to be sceptical of any really sweeping or novel claims in them, because you never know when he might be just making poo poo up and when he's actually doing good history.
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Feb 22, 2015 14:21
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A Dapper Walrus posted:Can anyone recommend a good history of nineteenth century Central Asia? I know this is super open-ended, but any overview of that area, preferably focusing on its inhabitants rather than the Russians or the English, would be much appreciated. If there aren't any major overviews, then any travelogues or works that have to deal with the native perspective of the Crimean War would do as well. If it's any help, I just finished Hopkirk's Great Game book, which is a lovely overview of the conflict between Russia and England in Central Asia. Jeff Sahadeo's Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent 1865-1923 is a pretty good look at the interaction between Russian colonizers and the native Central Asians who got colonized. It's very much a study of one city rather than the whole region though, so it may not be what you're looking for.
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Aug 14, 2015 22:59
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TheFallenEvincar posted:Any good Soviet history books? I've been reading The World Was Going Our Way and enjoying it author biases aside, but I was looking for something more general than specifically KGB What kind of general are you looking for? Like a textbook, or something more specific than that? A history of the entire Soviet Union over its entire timespan is a pretty huge topic, but one of the best single-volume histories in my opinion is Ron Suny's The Soviet Experiment. It's pretty textbook-y though.
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Aug 20, 2015 18:59
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Cythereal posted:Just finished The Sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 by John Clark. This is a good post and The Sleepwalkers is a great book but it was written by Christopher Clark not John Clark.
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Aug 25, 2015 16:29
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I found Charles Smith's Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict to be pretty good when I read it for a class a few years ago, though it's basically a textbook more than a monograph so it depends what you're looking for.
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Sep 6, 2015 17:01
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Star posted:I am looking for books covering the Napoleonic wars (and everything around that time) and/or the 19th century, especially the various great powers. I have read Hobsbawm's series, but anything else is welcomed. I know it's a really broad question and two really complex periods so the books don't have to cover everything happening during that time. Russia Against Napoleon by Dominic Lieven is a great book that covers exactly what's in the title.
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Sep 11, 2015 18:45
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Gringo Heisenberg posted:Anyone have recommendations for first person non-fiction war books? WW1 era onward to the Vietnam war. Books written by or with lots of input and experiences and thoughts from guys who were on the front lines and saw lots of action sort of thing, not strategic books or ones that look at the broad politics and strategies and battles and stuff. I enjoyed Guarnere and Heffron's book Brothers in Battle: Best of Friends, but didn't like Parachute Infantry by David Webster, and thought With the Old Breed by Sledge was ok. Also read Kill Anything That Moves and enjoyed it. A Riflemen Went to War was good too. Also ones that don't shy away from allied atrocities and stuff would be a plus. A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman
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Nov 2, 2015 01:33
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Trier posted:I'm currently reading The Blackest Streets by Sarah Wise I quite liked Judith Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight when I read it recently because my adviser wanted me to. It's about women in 1880s London, bookended by Jack the Ripper and the "Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" which was a newspaper expose on child prostitution in the city.
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Nov 21, 2015 15:07
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Railing Kill posted:This might be too broad to be a worthwhile question, but I'll try it anyway: I just finished a big tome (James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, not that it matters) and I'm looking to dive into a new topic. I don't really care what it is, so I'm looking for a suggestion of anything interesting, about any era or topic. I'm up for anything, so let me know if you've been itching to suggest something weird or interesting. I'm a Russia guy so I'm going to suggest some Russian books that I like. If you want something pop-y (i.e. well written) but written by a guy who has some academic cred and uses academic sources and extensive footnoting, I highly recommend Douglas Smith's Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy which is about the upper echelons of the Russian nobility in the war and early Soviet Period (until roughly the end of the 30s). If you want something more military oriented, I recommend Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon which is about exactly what you would think. Written by a famous academic who's renowned for writing very good books that have academic levels of rigour and research but are highly readable. If you're more interested in Stalinism and the Gulag, I recommend the memoir Gulag Boss by Fyodor Mochulsky which is as far as I know the first memoir published in English by someone who was on the other side of the Gulag's prisoner-guard relationship. It's a fascinating look at how the Gulag was often dreaded and seen as a prison sentence by its guards as well as its prisoners. Alternately, if you want to go with history's #1 book topic (World War II), Catherine Merridale's Ivan's War is a very good academic book about the Red Army in World War II, but is more of a social history of the soldiers who fought (with loads of interview from old Red Army veterans) than it is a military history about battles and manoeuvres. And as usual, I will highly, highly recommend A Writer At War by Vasily Grossman which is in my opinion the best personal account of the Eastern Front and probably one of the best personal accounts of the entire war in any theatre.
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Nov 24, 2015 03:25
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sbaldrick posted:This is going way up my to-read list. Please let me know what you think whenever you get around to it! I've been considering using some or all of it for teaching to undergraduates at some point in the future, so I'd be interested to hear someone else's opinion.
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Dec 2, 2015 19:36
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Crazyweasel posted:Hey I read through a bunch of pages here looking for a recommendation for my dad for Xmas. He generally likes fluffy ooo ra WW2/Iraq war books, but is actually a smart guy and I'd like to get him something a bit deeper in terms of lack of bias and content while still being an enjoyable read. Does he like reading about Russia in WWII, or just America? If he likes reading about Russia, buy him A Writer At War by Vasily Grossman. It is the best memoir available about the Eastern front.
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Dec 14, 2015 03:20
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Trier posted:Anyone wanna recommend me a book or two on the cold war? Preferably something about all the "classified" stuff like spies or behind-the-scenes diplomacy / backroom politics, just basically all the stuff that isn't common knowledge at this point. Russia's as interesting as America in this regard so either side of the wall would be interesting to hear about. The Sword and the Shield is an enormous book (700+ pages) but it's a fascinating look at the KGB. Alexander Mitrokhin, one of the authors, was a KGB archivist who smuggled documents out of his office every day for 12 years before defecting to the West and this is the first book written based on those documents, so it's an amazing inside look at the usually very secretive Soviet intelligence services. Be aware when reading it though that KGB defectors have a bad habit of overestimating the influence of KGB operations and taking credit for things like filling American universities with Marxist professors who corrupt American youth to turn them into communists. I can't remember how much of that there is in Mitrokhin's telling and it's moderated by the writing of the academic historian who serves as the book's primary author anyway, but be warned.
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May 3, 2016 00:18
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I think i have heard of this guy before because of that. Some right wingers use him as source to prove the leftist/sjws/communist/whatever they dont like agenda in schools. that it all came from commies. It may have been him or another high-profile KGB defector. Some of the defectors swung as far to the right as they could possibly get after leaving the Soviet Union because they really, really hated it and wanted to side with whoever would oppose it the most. There are some really funny interviews out there with guys like Yuri Bezmenov, who claimed that literally every left-wing thing in America was a plot by the KGB to undermine America. Feminists, gay people, and hippies? All useful idiots for the KGB masterminds who orchestrated the entire cultural Marxist takeover of America. It's pretty goofy. In case you have a spare hour, Bezmenov gave a pretty amazing interview in 1984 (the last 15 minutes are the really good part though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4 I can't remember seeing anything like that for Mitrokhin especially, but it's been a while since I read the book so I don't recall if there are any really wacky claims in there. Either way there's a ton of really cool spy stuff even if you should always be skeptical about any claims that the KGB were running things in the West. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 00:48 on May 3, 2016 |
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May 3, 2016 00:46
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Jamwad Hilder posted:didn't get any responses in the milotary history thread so I thought I'd try here. Could anyone recommend me some good books on the Napoleonic Wars? I'd specifically be interested in a biography of Arthur Wellesley or Horatio Nelson, or the Peninsular campaign, but I'm open to any suggestions if there's something you think is really great. Russia Against Napoleon by Dominic Lieven is really great, though as you can guess from the title it's heavily focused on Napoleon's Russian campaign and Russia's role in the European wars rather than being a broad general history.
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May 11, 2016 03:56
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:I really want to learn more about African history. I read some books on South Africa and Angola which were ok, as well as three general histories I didn't like much: The Fate of Africa, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, and Africa: A Biography of the Continent. I felt these just did not have sufficient depth and resorted to cliches too often. Start with Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, and see if you have the stomach for anything else afterwards  quote:I can highly recommend the companion volume The World Was Going Our Way. It covers operations in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The author is appropriately skeptical of some KGB claims about the success of active measures. Yeah I actually own the companion volume but I've never read it so didn't feel right to suggest it to someone else, so thanks!
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May 12, 2016 13:28
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Brodeurs Nanny posted:That's good to know. I tend to devise a general narrative arc and remember specific important events, so I suppose that's good enough for now. Similarly, if you're ever taking notes on a book it's an excellent idea to force yourself to also provide a very brief summary of the book to go with your more detailed notes. I usually try and limit mine to 2 or 3 sentences, because then it's a completely bare bones statement of the thesis. This is incredibly useful if you're ever trying to communicate the general idea of a work to someone else, like in a class or in a meeting with a professor. Or if you're recommending a book you liked to a friend.
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May 26, 2016 20:30
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Hemp Knight posted:Can anyone recommend a good book on the eastern front in WW2? Whenever I look in a bookshop, it's literally all about the western front with a few token books about the Pacific and China . Depends what you're looking for. I can recommend a couple books on the Russian side. If I had to recommend just one book, it would be A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman. Grossman was a famous writer who served in the Red Army as a correspondent for the army newspaper, and reported on everything from the initial Soviet collapse and retreat through the Battle of Stalingrad and the liberation of concentration camps by Soviet soldiers at the end of the war. While doing all this and writing articles for the Red Army newspaper, he also kept a series of diaries, which a couple historians have gone through and edited into a coherent narrative of Grossman's experiences. So 80-90% of the book is straight translations of his experiences, with the editors providing some context for the overall course of the war and Grossman's activities between journal excerpts. Other than that, Ivan's War by Catherine Merridale is an excellent book about the ordinary soldiers who fought on the Eastern Front for the Soviets, based on archival research and a lot of interviews with aged Red Army veterans. It's an academic history so it's thorough and has a ton of information in it, but other people in this thread have complained in the past that Merridale's writing was too dry and didn't work for them, so buyer beware. I like the book though. And Stalingrad by Antony Beevor has a very good reputation, though I've personally never read it so I can't in good conscience recommend it. One final recommendation, you can't really think of the Eastern Front without also thinking of the Holocaust in the East. The Eastern Front was as much an ideological war of annihilation as it was a strategic war of operations and tactics, and the Nazi military was deeply involved in making it a racial war of extermination of Aryan German Nazis versus Communist Slavs and Jews. The result was that millions of people were killed behind the war's front lines in what's sometimes called the Holocaust by Bullets or other similar terms, since it turns out a significant portion of the Holocaust's victims were summarily shot instead of being shipped to concentration camps. If this is something you're interested in learning about, a classic account of this from the German perspective is Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, which details how ordinary men from Germany could become systematic mass murderers of Jews in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union. Seriously though, buy A Writer at War, I recommend it all the time in this thread and I don't think anyone who's bought it has ever regretted it.
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May 26, 2016 22:14
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Schizotek posted:e: While I'm here: Histories on Venice and maybe some of the other Italian states pre-Napoleon. I own and quite enjoyed Roger Crowley's City of Fortune which is about the rise of Venice in the Middle Ages. It's well written and engaging pop history that's easy to get through, but he also quotes a lot of primary sources so it's not as superficial as a lot of pop stuff.
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May 28, 2016 02:25
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Shitshow posted:I'm woefully ignorant about African history. I was thinking about reading Africa: Biography of a Continent, but thought it might be better to read several books instead, each focusing on a different time and/or region. King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild is a must-read, unfortunately 
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Jul 30, 2016 15:31
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Fray posted:I want to learn more about Victorian Europe. Not so much the geopolitics side of things, which I already have a background of, but more the everyday culture, economics, art, and so forth. Any recommendations? That's a pretty broad field! Can you narrow it down at all? Are there certain countries, cities, years, topics, that you find particularly interesting?
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Aug 5, 2016 21:37
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Found out my local secondhand bookstore has a bunch of Robert K. Massie books, what's the general opinion about him around here?
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Oct 12, 2016 03:31
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chernobyl kinsman posted:Any recommendations on the Napoleonic Wars? My standard recommendation is Russia Against Napoleon by Dominic Lieven, which is understandably focused on Russian involvement and the Russian campaign, but you really can't understand the Napoleonic Wars without understanding especially the 1812 campaign that ended Napoleon's empire.
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Nov 12, 2016 18:10
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Suplex Liberace posted:Any good books on art or architecture history. Either a broad one or one focused on a specific movement would do. This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but Spiro Kostof's The City Assembled is a really cool book on the history of urban architecture--that is, the features of cities rather than of specific buildings, though Kostof was an architectural historian so his book also talks a lot about how specific building features affected urban developments. It's also beautifully printed and illustrated with literally hundreds of visual examples to demonstrate what he's talking about.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:41
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nerdman42 posted:Western Civ professor assigned the class to read Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, written and drawn by Joe Sacco. I was kind of side-eyeing being assigned a graphic novel but it was actually a really good read. It focus on Sacco's experiences as a journalist in Gorazde during the Yugoslav Wars. Weird mix of horrible massacres and day-to-day minutia. One section could talk about the horrors and rebuilding the Muslims experienced and another could focus on this quirky soldier who loves to sing American songs. One thing that stuck out to me is how bored people were during a period of "peace", because they're stuck in this small town without access to material goods, books, instruments, movies, etc. If you're interested in other historical graphic novels you really owe it to yourself to read Maus by Art Spiegelman which is about the Holocaust and Holocaust survival, and I also recommend Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi which are about the Iranian Revolution.
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Dec 7, 2016 04:34
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FingersMaloy posted:Can anyone recommend anything on the Spanish revolution and Civil War? The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston is the best book I've read on the Spanish Civil War. It's like 700 pages though.
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Dec 19, 2016 15:56
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lifts cats over head posted:Anybody have a recommendation on maps/map making throughout history? Dunno if you mean in general or for somewhere specific but Valerie Kivelson's Cartographies of Tsardom is a wonderful book about maps and space in early modern Russia.
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Feb 4, 2017 18:16
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