I’m currently reading a book called “The Treason Trials of Aaron Burr”. It leaves me wishing that someone would write a decent book on the treason trials of Aaron Burr.
I’d like to see a history of the Pythagorean religion, covering any influence it may have had on later belief-systems. There’s just something kewl about a religion that worships math.
That provision was widely flaunted after the war, and was a continuing source of friction. (Imagine the sort of reception a British creditor would receive in American courts after the war. Imagine the standard of proof to which he might be held even if his claims were heard.)
This is the thread of which spoke- spoke, in which we discuss the matter at some length.
I’d like to see a general history of Europe’s descent into authoritarianism in the 1920’s and 1930’s–much has been written about Germany, Italy, and Spain, but these weren’t isolated cases; virtually every country in southern and eastern Europe descended into dictatorship within a few years.
If we’re doing author requests, I’d like to see Gerald Posner do a book on Sacco and Vanzetti.
Little Nemo, have you checked out D. Michael Quinn’s Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power and Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power? Those are both on my to-read list, and while not perfect, have received a lot of praise. It’s probably a bit more information than I really want, though.
To some LDS, that’s just the illustrated version of Under the Banner of Heaven
It’s also $63.50, which is way more than I wanted to spend, but thank you very much for the suggestion- that’s pretty much exactly what I’m after (I’m interested in the entire Chinese Civil War, starting in the 1920s)!
Connections by James Burke touches on those subjects.
I’m sure that the provision was widely flaunted by the creditors. I take it that it was widely flouted by the American courts.
The History of Gold. You can trace it from ancient civilizations to use in electronics and now as an oxidation catalyst. How is it mined? How was it mined? It would be a huge book.
A history of the computer companies from roughly 1960 to about 1977, from the birth of the minicomputer to the advent of microcomputer companies as a viable business model. It should include IBM, DEC, Data General, Control Data, Amdahl, Honeywell, and other corporations that influenced each other and helped decide what post-mainframe computing would look like.
Honestly, the widely-written-about history of computing is too heavily slanted towards home computing and, therefore, begins in the late 1970s if you’re lucky. If you read uncritically and don’t have a grounding otherwise, you might be lead to believe Microsoft and Apple actually invented things! There’s a lot of history about what went on in corporations and universities that simply isn’t being written about in books and is only findable by combing through the archives of Usenet groups like alt.folklore.computers (heavy IBM and DEC bias) and other, more specialized fora.
Jason Scott is doing a wonderful job documenting the modem-based low-end personal computer networks generally referred to as BBSes. Someone ought to do a similar job documenting the networks strung within and between larger organizations, like BITNET for IBM shops and UUCP for early Unix systems. The path from ARPANET to the current Internet was not straightforward and it involved computer systems nearly forgotten now (such as the PDP-10s that were the first Internet computers, and the IMPs that held it all together in the early days).
I could probably go on like this for a long while. I think programming languages, operating systems, computer hardware, and user interface designs are all under-explored by historians, and the historians that do try are either not qualified to do the topic justice or are aiming at a very nontechnical audience that they assume doesn’t care about systems not sitting on their desk right now. I guess I really want a prolific author who seriously cross-trains in both computer geekery and history book authorship.
I thought that didn’t look right; I did look it up to confirm my usage before posting; Merriam-Webster backed me up:
After your post, I went back and read Merriam-Webster’s fine print. “Flaunted” has apparently become acceptable interchangeably with “flouted” in this context:
So even though I stand by “flaunted” as being correct usage, I agree with you that “flouted” would have been a better choice.
You might check out The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin. Its two semi-sequels The Creators and The Seekers are also very good.
Doesn’t look bad, but looking through the descriptions it looks like not quite what I would be hoping for.
He treats the subjects you listed seperately, but one can well see how tied together they are, even if he doesn’t make it completely explicit in the text.
Also doesn’t quite seem like what I’m envisioning.
Huh, I forgot about that case. You’re right – that could make for a fantastic double biography.
Of course, what constitutes an “objective” history will vary depending on whether the reader is a believing Mormon or not. Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) recommended Richard Abanes’s One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church in one of his Dilbert Newsletters. I checked it out. Abanes is a bit of a nutjob, but he does a pretty good job of sourcing his work and it’s written in a pretty easy-to-read manner. Quinn’s books, recommended earlier, are also pretty detailed and well-sourced but I found them much more dense and scholarly.