/lit/ - Literature

>>>/his/

>>12360452
>history of ancient western civilizaotn
well you're going to want to look for books written AFTER ancient western civilization took place, since history books are written after the history.

>>12360487
>tfw you will never read a history book written before the history takes place

It feels bad

The Greeks -> The Romans -> The Roman successor states -> The Mediaeval Church -> The Schism -> The Crusades -> The Renaissance -> The Age of Exploration -> The Protestant Reformation -> The Scientific Revolution -> The Industrial Revolution -> The Birth of the Nation-States -> The Rise of Democracy -> The Second Age of Exploration and Colonisation -> The Fall of the Empires -> The Two World Wars -> The Cold War -> The 1990s -> The Birth of the WWW -> The War on Terror -> The Meme Wars -> The Now
That's pretty much all you gotta know.

Any other suggestions lads?

Herodotus? I was afraid at first, but I loved it, it's very rewarding. Book 2 is peak comfiness and at the end in Chersonese I was like bruh... go read it anon!

>>12361425
gibbon's decline and fall of the roman empire. As /lit/ as a history book gets

>>12360452
What aspect of Western civilisation? Philosophy, art, sociology, military history, economics, etc. It's all bundled together, so you'll learn a lot about the general picture regardless of what you hone in on, but the idea of "Western civilisation" is too vast to describe without being particular. It's a concept so big it ends up being stretched thin... it's a simplification and a summary itself, so you can really only say what there is to say about the big big picture in a few words, at least as an intro. The closer you look, the more details you can see.

I'm more familiar with a philosophical/literary focus, and some good introductions in that area include 'The Passion of the Western Mind' (1991), 'The Story of Philosophy' (1926), or 'A Short History of Ethics' (1966). These are pretty good broad secondary literature. Russell's book 'A History of Western Philosophy' is famous but polemical, even anachronistic. Probably better judged as a personal philosophical statement than as an introduction to the characters and ideas it treats. That said, expect a degree of idiosyncrasy/opinionated stuff in anything you read, even in the books I recommended. It's part of the fun, and usually the author will be straightforward about which attitudes are his own, and will hopefully describe his thought process rather than dump prejudices on you.

History books that aren't just history of ideas are good too. Starting with the Greeks is fun, efficient, easy. Don't feel compelled to go linear. You'll piece things together organically and probably much faster if you read what interests you rather than what you feel compelled to read. Chances are you will spot familiar things you've learned and grow your frame of reference with every book you read -- adding depth, colour, shading to concepts you picked up from other texts as you go along.
>>12360539
Ummm swweeetie haven't you ever heard of the Protocols ;)

>>12360539
Really makes you think

>>12360539
>What is Brave New World

>>12360452
Read Durant's Story of Civilization series, it basically serves as a properly arranged and more reliable wikipedia. You use it to find events/time periods that interest you, then you find books on those specific topics and read them.