While playing through some of the historically accurate campaigns of Civilization 4, I recently realized that my knowledge of World History is quite lacking. Having gone to a fairly substandard public school, we never seemed to cover anything in-depth. For example, I don’t know where the Assyrian empire was, let alone anything about it other than the name. I only have a vague idea of the political climate of Europe before World War 1. Heck, I don’t even know the reasons for the war between the USA and Canada back in 1810.
A friend of mine recently recommended the podcast of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History (http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh). This is a great podcast. Carlin keeps the topic interesting by focusing not on specific dates and names, but on cultural and political influences that led to world events. Instead of rote memorization, he uses stories and anecdotes to keep the listener’s attention.
Can anyone recommend similar podcasts or books? The actual topic isn’t entirely important. Anything historical would be fine, spanning from ancient civilizations to more recent events like the first Gulf War, etc. Audio is preferred but not necessary.
I think one of the best world history books is Asimov’s Chronology of the World. It runs from the start of civilization to WWII. It has a great companion that follows technology through history, Asimov’s Chronology of Science and Discovery. Asimov writes with a bit of cynical humour that keeps me reading.
My interests tend to be Colonialism and Military History, but I’ll throw a few suggestions out there:
The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham does an excellent job of explaining why Europe suddenly decided to play a real life version of Risk using Africa as the board, and how they went about it.
Similarly, King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild goes into detail about how King Leopold II of Belgium managed to acquire and run The Congo as his own private fiefdom, and the many horrible things that happened there as a result.
Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything comes highly recommended, as does one of his other books Made in America.
The best overview of WWII that I’ve come across is the Reader’s Digest book The World At Arms. Anything with Antony Beevor’s name on the cover as the author is going to be worth reading, too.
Anne Applebaum’s book Gulag: A History is a fascinating look at the Russian Gulag system, Lesley & Roy Adkins have also written The Keys of Egypt which explains how the translation for Heiroglyphics was discovered…
If you’re looking for a good general history narrative, I’d recommend the TimeFrame series that was published by Time Life back in the nineties. They’re a well-written basic history with five books covering general topics and twenty books each covering the events of a specific period. Which might be the bad news - the entire series is twenty five volumes. But realistically, the history of the world is a big subject - this is about as small as you can go without leaving out important sections (and even this series skips some major events). The good news is the series was written for the general reader. And it should be readily available: many libraries would carry it and, if not, you can find used copies on Amazon for pretty low prices.
If you’re looking for specific titles:
Time-Frame: The Human Dawn
Time-Frame: The Natural World
Time-Frame: The Rise of Cities
Time-Frame: The Domestic World
Time-Frame: The Enterprise of War
Time-Frame 3000-1500 BC: The Age of God-Kings
Time-Frame 1500-600 BC: The Barbarian Tides
Time-Frame 600-400 BC: A Soaring Spirit
Time-Frame 400 BC-200 AD: Empires Ascendant
Time-Frame 200-600: Empires Besieged
Time-Frame 600-800: The March of Islam
Time-Frame 800-1000: Fury of the Northmen
Time-Frame 1000-1100: Light in the East
Time-Frame 1100-1200: The Divine Campaigns
Time-Frame 1200-1300: The Mongol Conquests
Time-Frame 1300-1400: The Age of Calamity
Time-Frame 1400-1500: Voyages of Discovery
Time-Frame 1500-1600: The European Emergence
Time-Frame 1600-1700: The Powers of the Crown
Time-Frame 1700-1800: Winds of Revolution
Time-Frame 1800-1850: The Pulse of Enterprise
Time-Frame 1850-1900: Colonial Overlords
Time-Frame 1900-1925: The World in Arms
Time-Frame 1925-1950: Shadow of the Dictators
Time-Frame 1950-1990: The Nuclear Age
A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield. Cochineal is the red dye made from bugs in Mexico. It was worth more by weight than silver and was highly prized by traders as well as pirates. This is the story of the cochineal trade.
*The Big Oyster *by Mark Kurlansky. New York once contained over half of the entire worlds oyster beds. This is the story of the effect this had on New York and what happened to them.
Rum: A Social and Sociable History by Ian Williams. A good little tale about rum, the Carribean and Yankee traders.
The Frozen Water Trade by Gavin Weightman. An awesome story of the guy who thought of cutting up frozen lakes and rivers and saving the ice for use over the summer.
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. The story of two men at the 1893 Columbia Exposition: Daniel Burnham, who designed it and H. H. Holmes, who murdered many people during it.
Charlatan by Pope Brock. The story of J. R. Brinkely, one of the biggest quacks in US medical history who also was a radio pioneer.
*A Nation of Counterfeiters *by Stephen Mihm. Counterfeiting in the US was rampant before the civil war. This an interesting study of how it was done and the problems authorities faced combatting it.
That’s all for now. If you want more, let me know.
The Pritzker Military Library has pod-casts of over one hundred authors speaking about their books on military and other historical topics. If you have I-tunes search for Pritzker under podcasts.
Several of these are Pulitzer winners, and richly deserved them:
Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers - A great look at the Framers of the Constitution and their relationships - sometimes friendly, sometimes not, always competitive - with each other.
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg - Disassembles and explains the Gettysburg Address - literate, classy and insightful.
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom - One of the best one-volume histories of the Civil War out there, IMHO.
Geoffrey Ward et al., The Civil War - Ditto.
David McCullough, Truman - A great bio of a long-underappreciated leader.
James Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man - Also a great bio. Read this to see just why Washington was so vital to the cause of American independence, and then practically invented the Presidency.
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton - A magnificent, highly readable profile of the brilliant but deeply flawed man who did more than anyone else to lay the groundwork for generations of American prosperity.
Larry Gonick: Cartoon History of the Universe, originally published in 19 chapters, more recently collected in three volumes.
Part One collects volumes 1-7, Part Two collects volumes 8-13, Part Three collects volumes 14-19.
Cartoon History of the Modern World, Volume 2 published just a couple of months ago.
Cartoon History of the United States.
Gonick gives you a good broad background, and at the end of each volume is an extensive bibliography of books and websites you can read to get more detail. (His comment on the Cambridge Ancient History: “produces enlightenment as it induces sleep”.)