A good recent book on the same topic is “River of the Gods” by Candace Millard
And the followup book Dark Sun about the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Two that I really enjoy:
The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events by Bernard Grun (Amazon.ca) and The Timetables of Technology: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Technology by Bryan Bunch and Alexander Hellemans (Amazon.ca)
For that matter, so is The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard. After Roosevelt lost his election bid, he decided to do something completely idiotic by trying to traverse an uncharted Amazon tributary. He was always the adventurer from his early days, but this was the most foolhardy thing he ever attempted.
I was going to bring up the The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius that those were based upon. They are very readable and quite scandalous.
A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.
Also, I highly recommend the memoirs of Daniel Ellsberg (who released the Pentagon Papers). It’s called Secrets.
Our text for AP history in the late '60s was The Growth of the American Republic, vol 1, up to the Civil War, by Samuel Eliot Morrison, and vol 2, after that, by Henry Steele Commager. My only problem with it was resisting from reading far, far ahead. I also read the official US Navy history of the Battle of Midway by Morrison, which was compulsively readable.
The Face of Battle by John Keegan was excellent also. It showed some major battles from the point of view of the fighters, not the leaders.
That was my text for AP History as well. Opened my eyes to a completely new, non-Washington cherry pie version of American history. Ultimately what led me to become a historian.
But I wouldn’t read it today. Two white patrician guys leaving out half of the country’s history. They were great for their time (post WWII). We need to read what’s great for our time.
Well, dont leave us hanging- which book?
And what new info has come to light?
Now outdated. Try The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
Yes, not bad, but yep- too long.
I will look into that, thanks.
Thanks, I will look into that also.
No offense to their devotees, but at the same time Star Wars was premiering, I stopped reading science fiction & fantasy and started reading old history books. The people and places in Guizot’s France or Gibbon’s Rome were as satisfyingly alien (or, in Gibbon’s books, Byzantine), as anything in Herbert’s Dune. While my friends enjoyed the almost supernatural aspects of scifi/fantasy (especially since we were all on dope back then) I liked that history was grounded in plausibility. It was still a look into an exotic, strange world, so from my decaying volume of Shiller’s Thirty Years War I took my own enjoyment. Was there much difference between the Palatinate and Palpatine, in terms of useless esoterica?
There was a trade-off. If you’re ignorant of pop culture, you’re somewhat outside of your culture. If you understand 1600’s Germany you have an almost negligibly better understanding of current events.
It’s been decades. I thought it was a book from a few years earlier but Wikipedia says “Tey’s pro-Richard arguments repeat some of those made in Clements Markham’s 1906 book Richard III: his life & character, reviewed in the light of recent research.[4].” If so, a 70-year-old book using 120-year-old history.
You can make your own decisions about the book’s worth as a readable novel, but please don’t base your understanding of history on it.
The Borgias, by G.J.Meyer. Cesare, Lucrezia, Rodrigo and the rest. I couldn’t put it down. I kept thinking “Who knew medieval Italian politics was so fascinating??”
And then I realized: it’s Game of Thrones without the dragons and zombies.
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England by Daniel Pool. An absolutely indispensable guide for readers of 19th century British fiction.
Ooh, I definitely want to check this one out! Thanks for the recommendation.
A few not mentioned:
The Power Broker by Robert Cano. One of the classics of modern biography, it’s as much a biography of New York City (at least in the era covered) as it is a biography of Robert Moses.
Postwar by Tony Judt. Maybe a little dated by now as it was finished in 2005, but still an excellent history of Europe after 1945.
Just finished The Last Ships from Hamburg by Steven Ujifusa, which just came out. Tells the story of the mass emigration from (mostly) Russia of Jews from the 1880s through the start of World War I, concentrating on the roles of three key people - a German Jewish shipping director, an American Jewish financier, and J. P. Morgan. Good stuff, makes me want to read more about that era.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson is an excellent read as well, comparing racism in the US to the caste system in India and the Nazi regime’s treatment of Jews and others.
Finally, although it’s been a long time since I read it, I remember getting a lot out of King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, which tells the story of Belgium’s brutal colonization of the Congo.
I definitely second this one. It was truly an eye-opening book, and one of my favorite reads. Extremely well written and researched, too.
Can’t resist, two more:
The Pine Barrens by John McPhee. McPhee is always a good read and writes beautifully. This is my personal favorite of his, writing about the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey.
The Doctor and the Saint by Arundhati Roy. I found this after reading Caste which I recommended above, this tells more about the caste system in India, specifically comparing the positions taken by Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar (who I’d just read about for the first time in Caste). Roy is pretty far out to the left politically, and I’m not sure I agree with her on everything, but she’s an excellent writer.
There’s always Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – a classic, if REALLY long. There are abridgements
The Twelve Caesars by Michael Grant. Puts them (and Suetonius) in perspective.
If fiction’s what you want, Colleen MacCulloch’s “Makers of Rome” series is great. Start with **The First Man in Rome. **
I like a lot of the books recommended above. I’d also suggest David McCulloch’s books. I think I’ve read them all. I started with The Great Bridge (about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge) and went backwards to The Johnstown Flood and forwards from there.
As something of a skeptic, I loved Richard Shenkman’s trio Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History and the less well-known I Love Paul Revere, Whether he Rode or Not and Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of World History. These books are all starting points, like Jearel Walker’s Flying Circus og Physics – they’ll point out things that aren’t really true, or which have been misrepresented, and give you the references to look up originsal work for more detail. The last volume is sketchier than the first two (if you can even find it), and feels like a contractual obligation work, but is still worth reading.
That leads me to James Lowen’s books, which themselves go into much more detail and which point out how political bias has screwed up the teaching of history in the USA, something that has become much more important and obvious as time has gone by. His original Lies my Teacher Told Me is a classic, but don’t overlook Lies Across America tells about how local and political bias colors the choice and wording of historical markers and monuments. The book that really startled me was Sundown Towns, which shows that the phenomenon was MUCH more widespread than I’d realized.
Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths goes into much more detail on a few of the things Shenkmasn and even Lowen cover only briefly.
I also recommend Kenneth C. Davis’ books. You might think you already know everything in Don’t Know Much about History and its many sequels, but there are a few surprises. And his American Hidden History is worth reading.
I’m a big fan of Janes Burke (“Connections”, “The Day the Universe Changed”, etc.). His American Connections does the same sort of thing with American history.
I agree. I don’t remember what they said about slavery, but I’m sure it didn’t show the real horror of it, and I think it still did the “carpetbaggers were evil” garbage. But for literary value, volume 1 was the best.
When my daughter was taking AP history her text was awful, and so we picked out a more modern history book but not textbook for her to read. Worked fine.