I recommend The Battle for Christmas, a history of the Christmas holiday in America. It details how the experience of the holiday has changed for ordinary people over the years. What’s really fascinating is seeing how many of the “old” traditions were invented in very recent times but passed off as something antiquated. Pulitzer Prize winner, IIRC.
I just re-read Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel. It’s about women’s lives in 17th century England. Like Tuchman, she’s scholarly, but still very accessible. The book focused mostly on the lives of elite women–they were the ones who could write and were written about in contemporary accounts, but she does discuss the life of the “average” woman as well.
Fraser’s The Wives of Henry VIII is also great. She uses the stories of these 6 very different women to illuminate the mindset, politics, and daily lives of the European nobility. It also touches on how the commoners perceived each queen. Very interesting stuff.
Her book The Proud Tower is a great percursor to The Guns of August. It chronicles the Western world on the eve of WWI… and gives a great portrait of a culture that came to an end during that war.
The reason I haven’t bothered to stop into this thread before this point was because I figured the first couple posts would by simulrecommendations of this extremely important book . I am shocked–shocked, I tell you–that it hasn’t already come up.