/lit/ - Literature

>>15453799
I thought 'The Iran-Iraq War' by Pierre Razoux was very entertaining

What is the best book about the history of the US?

McPherson is based, not only for his good scholarship and readability but also for BTFOing the 1619 project

>>15454036
I just posted the series

Just tell about Guns Germs and Steel and how bad it is and then everyone will think you're well read in history.

>>15453799
Going by topic

>American Civil War

The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote
Confederates in the Attic Tony Horwitz
Modernizing a Slave Economy by John D. Majewski

>Russian Revolution

A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes

>Eastern Front of WWII

Just watch David Glantz and Anthony Beevor fight each other lmao

>Economy of Nazi Germany

Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze
Vampire Economy by Günter Reimann

>Incredibly autistic niche maritime history

The Sinking of the Princess Sophia — Taking the North Down With Her by Ken Coates
Baychimo: Arctic Ghost Ship by Anthony Dalton
Shipwrecks & Salvage on the East African Coast by Kevin Patience

>>15454044
>McPherson
>based

Yankee swine are not welcome on this board

>>15453799
Anything that's a primary, contemporary source for what you're interested in. So, Thucydides for the Peloponnesian War, Seven Pillars of Wisdom for the Arab Revolt, etc.

>>15453799
/his/ is just literal pol-babbies making threads and meming with a small handful of genuine history nerds checking their shit and getting ignored.

>>15454458
I don't think you've ever browsed /his/

>>15453799
Gibbon's Rome; Mommsen's Rome
Macaulay's England; Hume's England
Wilson's (Ed.) Patriotic Gore
Von Ranke on the Popes and Reformation Europe
Burckhardt's Greeks, Constantine, and Renaissance
Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages
Tuchmann's Distant Mirror, Guns of August
Michelet's, and Carlyle's, French Revolution
Churchill's WW 2
Caton, Foote, Macpherson's American Civil War
Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus
...

>>15454545
Seconding mommsen

>>15454545
nice
Longford's Wellington; Sugden's Nelson
for literary purposes Southey's Nelson's a good primer

>>15454458
Last time I was there it was a bunch of idiots denying Soviet war crimes and proclaiming the immortal science of Marxism-Leninsim. /lit/ psueds would probably love it.

anything by Hobsbawm

>>15455083
trash

Pat Buchanan's Unnecessary War.

>>15453799
Citizens by Schama
The Civil War by Foote
The Black Jacobins by James
The Third Reich Trilogy by Evans
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Arendt
The American Revolution: A History by Gordon Wood
Battling to the End - Rene Girard
To the Bitter End: Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance - Leuchars, Chris
The Conquest of the Incas by Hemming
The Lords of Sipan - Kirkpatrick
The 30 Years War - CV Wedgwood
A Savage War of Peace by Horne
A Distant Mirror by Tuchmann
The Faces of Battle by Keegan
Devil Take the Hindmost
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land - Asbridge
Guerilla Days in Ireland: A Personal Account of the Anglo-Irish War - Barry
Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages - Mcgovern
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages - Cohn
The Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan by Stephens and Catherwood
The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 by Evans
The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering by Finkelstein
The Story of the Scrolls: The Miraculous Discovery and True Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Vermes
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Stearns
Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe - Davies
After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC - Mithen
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda - Dallaire
1491 by Mann
The Great Siege: Malta 1565 Bradford
The Venture of Islam - Hodgson
Bitter Harvest by Ian Smith

and of course gibbons, the chinese annals that are extant, the roman histories etc

>>15456063
Finkelstein aside this is a fine selection.

>>15456083
im not a /pol/ type, but finkelstein, arendt (and by arendt i mean hilberg) and evans are about as good as you can get for revisiting the holocaust without any sort of spielbergian melodramatics or claims to absurdity. Evans posits that many of the deaths of jews in the east are extrapolated from population collapse in the bloodlands of eastern poland and belarus, and from local militias in hungary, lithuania, etc that were nominally independent aside from SS material support. The numbers suspect are lower by a million, and finkelsteins research into the matter shows that actual survivors were in the low hundred thousands and that "survivors" that immigrated in 33 and lived in brooklyn during the war ended up forming the central corpus of the spielbergian myth, much of which exists to extract money from the drama of situation.

This guy timothy snyder wrote a book called bloodlands which is really well reviewed, but he puts on the breaks before he comes to the final conclusion that the german efforts at genocide were much more haphazard and of a smaller scale than the mythos has concluded. Also his scholarship is trash.

I would add David Irving's Trail of the Fox to the list, its a great little ww2 biography (since we are talking about legit historians on the fringe of public perception)

>>15456164
this of course is not to diminish individual sufferings that did exist in camps

>>15456164
Snyder is kinda nuts but the haphazard holocaust argument comes from the ongoing functionalist vs intentionalist arguments. Snyder was just focusing on the history of that slice of eastern europe and was pulling on the same arguments/data as the functionalist.

I think the real historians now agree that it was a mix of obvious intent, just read the wannsee papers for that and obvious ad hoc structural reactions to the situation on the ground where you get jews piling up in poland waiting to be deported into russia after the germans win but they never won so they have to do something with them.

>>15456267
what's the deal with snyder? I read his book about Putin and Russian collusion and thought it was decent but not great, but then when i read about him online it seems people don't think he's reliable or has much integrity

Is there a book in similar quality to OP that discusses the events leading up to the topics covered in that book? I started reading the book but felt like my enjoyment would be greatly improved if I knew the underlying context and history for the creation of the country before that.

Not sure if one book is able to summarize all of my wants but figured I'd ask.

>>15456498
the impending crisis by david m. potter

>>15456498
Allan Nevins' Ordeal of the Union series covers 1847-65 and is supposed to be very good, but I haven't read it.

>>15456530
Cool, thanks I'll add it to my collection. To go further, I plan on reading Washington's Crossing but am now in search of a book that essentially goes from 1600 up until 1770, but I highly doubt that even exists so I'll probably have to find a separate book on the early life of settlers and then another one about events leading up to Washington's Crossing.

Not American so just trying to get a perfect overview of all of this without having to read 20 books out of the gate.

>>15456458
>I read his book about Putin and Russian collusion and thought it was decent but not great
Are you retarded?

>>15456570
Not exactly easy to get.

>>15456458
he kinda broke the historian code which is not talking about anything contemporary and instead he cobbled together some weird theory using old ass russian philosophy, and observations of current russian actions and used it to explain the matrix of US and russian geopolitical struggle. Kinda came off as conspiracy theory level stuff.

But he knows his stuff about ukraine, he's made some very good points about how important it is right now and throughout history and how if we ever want to win russia to our side we need to start with the ukraine to show russians you can join the west with an eastern orthodox culture and history.

He is a good speaker overall, I think he just lost his focus as a historian in the past 10 years. Kinda like Adam Tooze who has gone from a serious academic historian to more like a popular economist.

>>15456731
is tooze really considered a "popular economist"? I was thinking of reading The Deluge and nothing about the book suggested that it's more pop oriented

>>15456787
deluge and wages were fantastic and important. Crashed is also fantastic but it wasn't really history nor was it technical economics, its just a cracking good narrative.

And seeing what he is talking about now publicly, is all about high level economics and his turn toward green financing stuff, makes me doubt that his next book will not even be close to a proper history book.

>>15456660
What are you saying? That i'm retarded for not realizing it was junk? Please clarify anon

>>15456706
Maybe if you want a complete set, the individual volumes aren't hard to track down on ebay and at used bookstores.
>>15456787
The central thesis of The Deluge is good, but the book itself is rambling and unfocused. If Tooze had stuck to writing about the US the book would have been far more coherent. Instead we get long tangents about Russia and China that don't really add anything to his argument and come off as glosses on areas outside Tooze's expertise.

>>15456731
What is up with Adam Tooze? I know his historical books but has he significantly changed?

>>15456813
What do you mean green financing?

>>15456933
I like him and have been following him for years but he has really shifted from 20th century military/economic history to contemporary financial stuff ever since his started Crashed. See his twitter or blog for and it becomes pretty clear what he is engaging with right now.

His big thing now is climate change and how to finance decarbonizing the economy or "green financing", although if you are interested in modern economics his is a good voice that is not mired in technical details.

>>15456458
His book on tyranny is utter trash, im not carl schmitt scholar but his takes are highschool student with wikipedia level

Bloodlands is boring as fuck if youve read real ww2 history

>>15457006
That's really interesting, I suck shit at economics so maybe I'll give it a shot. Would you say he comes from a given school of economics?

>>15456267
is there a book on the The Wannsee Conference and scholarship that isnt mired in virtue signaling Wieselesque crooning

>>15453799
I recently ordered the Oxford History of the United States in its entirety. I am looking forward to it.

>>15457017
he is a Keynesian liberal, but not too ideological, more reasonable and looking at the facts, in Crashed he is very critical of the GOP, but also notes how obama prostrated himself to wallstreet and stifled the progressive movement.

listen to a couple of lectures by him about crashed, watch the big short, and if you like his voice and the subject give it a read, its long but not impenetrable, it does go into autistic detail on how 2008 happened so be ready to learn about mortgage backed securities and money markets.

>>15457011
On Tyranny is probably one of the worst non-fiction books I've ever read, it really has nothing to do with tyranny and everything to do with the 2016 election. Snyder was so bootyblasted over Trump becoming president that he shat the thing out in like a month after the election. It's filled with stuff like "Trump supporters like to wear red hats and many of them probably own guns, which is pretty much the same thing as an uniformed paramilitary organization if you think about it." The whole thing is downright insulting to the reader's intelligence, and become more and more ridiculous as time passes. I'm taking very good care of my copy, it'll be a hilarious historical curiosity in a couple decades.

>>15454418
requesting epub of Shipwrecks & Salvage on the East African Coast if possible

>>15457105
I have one as well, I read it in early 2019, by which time he had prophesy'd concentration camps for jews, times reporters, and transsexuals

>>15457042
just read the documents that survived yourself and that's pretty much all you need to see... no spin either way.

http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/news/uploads/WanseeProtocols.pdf

>>15456874
Yes you're retarded for giving any sort of credence to Russian conspiracy theories which were cynically pushed by Democrat elites in an effort to rally the base against Trump. It also had the fortunate effect of distracting people from the Crimes of Hillary, Obama, and the FBI.

>>15453799
Herodotus and Thucydides are pretty comfy, anything else is cringe.

>>15457154
>Herodotus and Thucydides are pretty comfy, anything else is cringe.
>I am an 18 year old who just read my first history book of my own volition

>>15457042
The Wannsee conference Myth by Francis Dupont.

>>15457175
I doubt there are many 18 year olds reading Herodotus and Thucydides, they're mostly attracted to mass market paperbacks about tank battles on the eastern front.

>>15457272
Unless they played Rome Total War and its variants and jaunted around /lit/ at the same time

>>15457288
or even worse.../his/

>>15457272
> doubt there are many 18 year olds reading Herodotus and Thucydides

what are classics students

>>15457357
What % of 18 year olds study classics at univeristy?

>>15457404
thats not even the issue, thucydides and herodotus are the two first works you are supposed to read in meme lists, and the funnel from /v/ to /his/ to /lit/ is paved with such young neckbeards who just read Nietzsche.

>>15453799
/lit/erally started reading this last night and yes it is good

>>15456933
Tooze is an excellent scholar whose Wages of Destruction pretty much signaled a paradigm shift in histories of fascist economies and day-to-day operations. Don’t listen to the naysayers who think he got swept up in the post-recession prognostication game, he’s smart and knows his stuff

>>15456458
Surprised (or rather unsurprised) that no one has refuted the basic argument of Bloodlands, which is that the lack of a functioning polity/state enabled atrocities on an industrial scale. I don’t care about his politics

>>15453799
Stephen Kotkin's Stalin biography

>>15457146
You sound like a total partisan hack, anon. "Oh no they're guilty of crimes" is the new calling everyone a Nazi. Left wing/Right wing politics are such a joke at this time.

>>15457078
Thanks anon, I'll check it out.

>There are few Printed things one meets with, of such tragic almost ghastly significance as those bald Pages of the Bulletin du Tribunal Révolutionnaire, which bear title, Trial of the Widow Capet. Dim, dim, as if in disastrous eclipse; like the pale kingdoms of Dis! Plutonic Judges, Plutonic Tinville; encircled, nine times, with Styx and Lethe, with Fire-Phlegethon and Cocytus named of Lamentation! The very witnesses summoned are like Ghosts: exculpatory, inculpatory, they themselves are all hovering over death and doom; they are known, in our imagination, as the prey of the Guillotine. Tall ci-devant Count d’Estaing, anxious to shew himself Patriot, cannot escape; nor Bailly, who, when asked If he knows the Accused, answers with a reverent inclination towards her, ‘Ah, yes, I know Madame.’ Ex-Patriots are here, sharply dealt with, as Procureur Manuel; Ex-Ministers, shorn of their splendour. We have cold Aristocratic impassivity, faithful to itself even in Tartarus; rabid stupidity, of Patriot Corporals, Patriot Washerwomen, who have much to say of Plots, Treasons, August Tenth, old Insurrection of Women. For all now has become a crime, in her who has lost.

>Marie-Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her look, they say, as that hideous Indictment was reading, continued calm; “she was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one plays on the Piano.” You discern, not without interest, across that dim Revolutionary Bulletin itself, how she bears herself queenlike. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of Laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ‘You persist then in denial?’—‘My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that.’ Scandalous Hébert has borne his testimony as to many things: as to one thing, concerning Marie-Antoinette and her little Son,—wherewith Human Speech had better not further be soiled. She has answered Hébert; a Juryman begs to observe that she has not answered as to this. ‘I have not answered,’ she exclaims with noble emotion, ‘because Nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a Mother. I appeal to all the Mothers that are here.’ Robespierre, when he heard of it, broke out into something almost like swearing at the brutish blockheadism of this Hébert; on whose foul head his foul lie has recoiled. At four o’clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and two nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other darkening of counsel, the result comes out: Sentence of Death. ‘Have you anything to say?’ The Accused shook her head, without speech. Night’s candles are burning out; and with her too Time is finishing, and it will be Eternity and Day. This Hall of Tinville’s is dark, ill-lighted except where she stands. Silently she withdraws from it, to die.

>>15454418
>David Glantz and Anthony Beevor
What's their fight about?

bump

>>15456083
Pretty much agree on its own merits but 75% of this is purely /his/, not /lit/

>>15459156
If philosophy threads are allowed to take up over half of the catalog, we should be allowed to have history threads as well. /his/ book threads are few and far between.

>>15459354
That’s because people on /his/ don’t even pretend to read lol. At least people on /lit/ posture that they do

>>15453799
The Idea Of Decline In Western History and 1917 by Arthur Herman

>>15459589
Is this any good, or is it just glownigger "teehee don't worry about us, we're too incompetent ;)" apologism?

>>15453799
Freedom's Forge has been a pretty fun read.

The Ancient City by Coulanges

>>15459666
If its a butterfly recommendation you should probably ignore it

Also nice trips

>>15461626
Newfag here. What's a butterfly recommendation?

>>15456037
Nah that’s shit, go back to /pol/. Hitchens refuted it already

>>15461709
Butterfly is a fat dyke tripfag who thinks every thread is about her and posts the same book day after day. She's in her late 40s.

I would always recommend looking into a book and not judging it by the person recommending it, but she is extremely stupid and not one person on the entire board likes her or values her contributions. We all hate Buttershit. She has this magic combination of making absolutely worthless, one-note, Youtube comment tier posts while simultaneously knowing that she's the most important person in the thread and everyone is waiting to hear her opinion. Even when her opinion is nothing at all.

I hate you you fucking old dyke bitch. Fuck you.

>>15454418
>Shipwrecks & Salvage on the East African Coast by Kevin Patience
Anyone got a pdf or an epub? Can't find it anywhere.
Also, if anyone's got anymore good maritime history books I'd be interested for one.

best books on japanese military leadership meiji era onwards?
even just ww2 stuff would be alright

>>15461946
I loved Shattered sword when I read it but this was when I was 14-15

>>15461786
Like Hitchens was never refuted lmao. Hitchens is ass bro

>>15461786
>telling someone to go to /pol/ for being a 1980s vintage paleocon
You are why internet neonazis are a thing, dumbass. Enjoy what little grip you still have on the status quo while it lasts.

>>15461946
the rising sun by john toland

it's outdated in some regards but still remains one of the best written narratives

>>15456083
What's wrong with Finkelstein?

>>15462191
Nothing, raul hilberg the author of Destruction of the European Jews, the standard magisterial and academic mainstream approved account of the Holocaust, was a good friend of his and praised the book highly

Finkelstein made himself an easy target for the disingenuous smears of self-hating Jew and holocaust denier by writing the book and he knew it, he walked into that knowing it would make him loathed by every hack. Too bad for him academia and the "American intelligentsia" are full of hacks and their useful idiot champagne socialist college students who see "critical" and "Holocaust" on the same page in a New York Times review and immediately start talking about how Hitler had one ball.

>>15456164
>arendt (and by arendt i mean hilberg)
Explain this to me please?

>>15456063
I copied and pasted this... thanks anon, how's Origins of Totalitarianism by Arendt or Toynbee's A Study of History?

>>15462288
not the same anon but I think he's implying that hilberg's work on the matter is superior to arendt's work

>>15462304
>how's Origins of Totalitarianism by Arendt

great entry level on 20th century politics

>>15462310
But he didn't list any Hilberg on his list.

>>15462318
because he's probably not the anon who posted the list

>>15462317
Ok thanks,

>>15462330
he wrote several succeeding posts indicating that he did.

>>15455083

Hofstadter is the best for entry level treatment of Modern European History. His prose is exceptional.

Richard Hofstadter is excellent for American intellectual and cultural history. If you're interested in American diplomatic history, I recommend Walter LaFeber (The New Empire in particular) and other people who came out of the University of Wisconsin. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. sucks shit and should be avoided at all costs.

>>15462358

First sentence should be Hobsbawm rather than Hofstadter- sorry

>>15453799
read Fernand Braudel

>>15462400

Annales school SUCKS

>>15462412
+1

>>15462483

It does though. Hmm there was a decrease in the output of grain from this port in the ottoman empire during this decade, I wonder why? Oh that's right they went to war with the Byzantines.

It was a necessary corrective to the Rankean school, but you cannot completely discout the influence of political history. Also, everyone who wants to understand history as a discipline should read Wallerstein and I mean that as neither an endorsement nor condemnation

>>15461946
S.C.M. Paine's work is good, if you just want military stuff.
John Dower's War Without Mercy and Embracing Defeat deal with the issue of racism in the war and the process of occupation, restructuring, and reconstruction that Japan went through after the war.
For a really influential, though honestly dim-witted take on the military leadership, read Maruyama Masao's influential essay, The Logic and Psychology of Ultranationalism 超国家主義の論理と心理

>>15453799
christopher clark

Sorry if wrong board, does anyone have any good calibre new recipe sources they can share?

Guys, recommend me good non-fiction about the Eastern Mediterranean of the Bronze Age and early Antiquity.

>>15454036
I don’t think there’s any single one. I do think the history of the US begins with the french revolution though. A few off the top of my head Citizen, Paris in the Terror, Anti/pro federalist papers, Democracy in America by Tocqueville, there’s a civil war trilogy out there by Shelby Foote that’s pretty good i’ve heard.
Much like other great civilizations I don’t think it can be well encompassed by one book and anyone trying to sell you that idea is either a profiteer or retarded.

>>15453799
Churchill hitler and the unnecessary war
Pat Buchanan

>>15453799
Prescott's History of Conquest of Mexico is great

>>15462288
Arendt evidentially borrowed a lot from Hilberg and never credited him properly. Somebody linked an article about it here once, but I don't have a link.

>>15454036
People's history of the US. Everyone here is going to get angry by the suggestion, but it's the second layer to get through after exposure to the standard U.S. history learned in school. There are plenty of more specific time period books to read and biographies of great men, but understanding the ramifications of those great men's actions are generally downplayed in anything I read that attempts to be historically prim and proper. When more than 10 people die it seems to just become a statistic to people.

>>15463596
Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant

>>15464129
>People's history of the US

terrible recc if we're speaking one volume books only

>>15459354
I didn't argue against having a history thread; in fact I've read three of Simon Schema's books- pic'd as well as his book on the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic and his history of the Jews. On the other hand /lit/ history books should conform to classics in the manner if this list:
>>15454545
Just an opinion. Also, though I prefer more /lit/ books reading Plato through Sloterdijk definitely has its literary aspects.

>>15454036
das kapital

>>1

>>15453799

>>15461946
Theres a translated autobiography called A Japanese Destroyer Captain, written by the guy whose ship cut JFK's torpedo boat in half. He talks about a number of leasdership related subject, like incompetent staffing, infallable commanders and the competition between navy and army officers in political direcction of the war.