/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11370318]

What are some history books every person should read?

[Anonymous No.11370329]

Guns, Germs, and Steel

[Anonymous No.11370334]

>>11370318
herodotus, thucydides, winston churchill

[Anonymous No.11370337]

germans steal guns

[Anonymous No.11370347]

>>11370329

OP here
>>>/his/4894502
here’s there original thread i had on /his/, Guns, Germs, and Steel was also a favorite there

[Anonymous No.11370350]

Start, With, and the Greeks

[Anonymous No.11370366]

>>11370318

A People's History of the US
Oliver Stone's The Untold History of the United States
Guns, Germs, and Steel
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Anything by Bill O'Reilly
1421: The Year China Discovered the World
John Green's Crash Course: History (Youtube)

[Anonymous No.11370373]

Postwar is incredibly good.

Norman Davies is quite interesting in that he far prefers Eastern Europe to Western Europe. When reading his Europe: A History it truly feels different because of the weight given to the east, specifically Poland.

[Anonymous No.11370415]

>>11370318
>mfw this thread as a history major

[Anonymous No.11370437]

>>11370415
Sorry, I didn't realize we had a history major here. We'll use smaller words for you.

[Anonymous No.11370441]

>>11370318
Mein Kampf

[Anonymous No.11370443]

>>11370366
Great list

[Anonymous No.11370446]

/his/ has a reading list i think
>>11370329
>>11370366
>>11370347
i thought Guns, Germs, and Steel was frowned upon.

[Anonymous No.11370449]

>>11370318
Gibbons' Decline and Fall
Schama's Citizens
Churchill's History of the English Speaking People
Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian
Evans Third Reich Series
The Black Jacobins
After The Ice - Mithen
Plutarch's Lives
Kagans Greek Series on the P. war
1491
The Venture of Islam by Hodgson
Tuchmann's Distant Mirror and Guns of August
Iron Kingdom
The Crime of the Congo by Arthur Conan Doyle

>>11370373
Norman Davies Vanished Kingdoms was awesome

>>11370366
>>11370337
Guns Germs and Steel is trash, and has been utterly devastated by the right and left. Try Why Nations Fail. Institutional failure and the actions of elites are way more in vogue now.

>>11370443
ech

[Anonymous No.11370463]

>>11370449
Even better though:

1. Find subject you are interested in.
2. Go to oxfordbibliographies and wikipedia, and find referenced works
3. cross reference using scholastic book reviews on JSTOR to make sure people arent pooping on it.
4. download using libgen

pic only somewhat related, i cant get it anywhere for a reasonable price or pdf

[Anonymous No.11370471]

>>11370446
>>11370449

Guns Germs and Steel is controversial. I've never heard a decent argument against the historical or logical soundness of the book (I am willing to entertain one). It's hard to have a discussion about how Western European people were able to colonize/conquer the world without rustling some jimmies. Spoilers: It wasn't their skin color that enabled them to do it.

I say you should still read it.

[Anonymous No.11370481]

>>11370471
i read it for an AP history class
I think the main problem was assuming that only europe was advance, because asia also had some powerful empires. The big defining difference in my opinion happened in the industrial revolution though. See, china had gun powder before europe, but the industrial revolution mass produced weapons that used it. the other nations lost due to the shear power of the supplies being popped. It was just the luck of the draw rather than the access to resources. Africa however is a hard continent to become powerful in

[Anonymous No.11370494]

>>11370471
If you havent then you arent well read. The idea of geographical determinism is disabused in the institutional model.

Consider:

Costa Rica's inherent stability despite the shitshows around it.
Argentina's inability to create a coherent state for more than a decade
Southern Italy refusing to live up to its northern half.
Botswana thriving under international development while Zimbabwe chokes on its own dick.

Read Fukuyama's most recent book political order and political decay as well as the aforementioned work by Acemoglu. They both create a model where institutions are built by either inclusive or exclusive models based upon the choices of elites, and that successful institutions decay as they become more and more exclusive. Diamond's premise falls apart when you look at success at the microscale. Here is Acemoglu crushing Diamond's review of his book:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/08/16/why-nations-fail/

I really see no reason to read GGS as academics across the world have, sometimes sorrowfully, put it away. Also, Jared fetishizes Atahualpa as the focii of his whole thesis, but our based friend Taleb could answer that this ultimately was a black swan, that was purely out the head of pizarro ripping off cortes, and not some microcosm of worlds in collision.

[Anonymous No.11370504]

>>11370494
Also, as a rebuttal i dont agree with, the left has shit on him as well. Their premise is that geographical determinism has created sectioned off peoples who are at a disability to create success...on may call them...RACES????

This is not a good thing for the left, who see Jared Diamond as a white man trying to take a pygmy down a notch by saying SORRY, YOU DIDNT EXIST IN A HYPER COMPETITIVE WESTERN EUROPEAN BLOOD MATCH FOR 1000 YEARS.

Considering how many academics are intersectionalists now, its no wonder that the right and left have given him the boot.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455752.2013.846490?journalCode=rcns20

[Anonymous No.11370525]

>>11370481
China is a huge problem for Diamond's thesis as well. Talk about having everything going for you, and then constantly waxing and waning over millenia.

If China lived up to geographical determinism, it would have been the one to send colonial fleets to africa and the middle east, competed on par with europe, and colonized the new world.

On the other hand, if you look at shit like eunuchs and court factions suppressing technological advancement and reform from 1400 to the 1920s, and maoist shitstorms undermining stable societal structures, it fits perfectly into the institutional model.

[Anonymous No.11370528]

>>11370446
it's shitty pop history your stepdad reads so he can look smart when at rotary club meetings

[Anonymous No.11370606]

>>11370366
Delete this right now

[Anonymous No.11370625]

A little secret when looking for an introduction to some historical subject: look for older major books on the topic, written before or in the 1970s ideally, by major scholars. Then look among their reviews and info until you find out which ones really were the "standard" one for decades and decades, and read that - sometimes, even if it's from the early 20th century.

These are often much much better than more recent shit that assumes every student has ADD and can only read "thematically" about genderqueer shit and wants to skim over dates and details. Would you rather read a "Rome: A History" written by a committee of sixteen gender theorists in 2012 to fully represent the cultural diversity of pot-makers while neglecting basic narrative details, or read Rostovtzeff's elegant, short introduction, "Rome," in a fifth of the time it takes you to drag yourself through the other one, leaving you time to read 4 other classic studies - the studies that all those shitty scholars were fortunate enough to read when THEY were in graduate school, BEFORE it was decided that readers are too stupid for real information..

Also, while cutting edge info may change, and methodology differs across generations, most of the basic narrative doesn't. If you want to read post-60s socio-economic history of Rome, you still need the basic narrative structure, which you can get enjoyably from something older. Why begin with insanely dense ground-up specialist studies in the 70s just because those are "newer"? Again, those people were themselves weaned on the classic studies..

[Anonymous No.11370671]

>>11370625
What would you suggest for current US history if everything current is shit?

[Anonymous No.11370688]

>>11370318
Any top-tier biographies like Kotkin's series of Stalin? Like Mao: The Unknown Story, etc?

[Anonymous No.11370717]

>>11370625
The problem with this method are fields where archaeology is fundamental. Like you cant read a book on the Maya from the 70s compared to now, even discounting the translation of the language. Same with etruscan, silk road, or even heroic age greek studies. Even if you dont like the social conclusions, you have to be up on modern scholarship, although I dont dispute that reading the masters before progressing to newer works is probably for the best.

[Anonymous No.11370736]

read pic related a fucking guy

[Anonymous No.11370986]

>>113704
I haven't read the article you referenced yet but I'll give it some attention tomorrow. I think we might have different ideas about what Guns Germs and Steel actually says. Diamond addresses your point in an article on his website http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Geographic_determinism.html

Guns Germs and Steel doesn't assert that the world would necessarily have turned out this way, just that there must necessarily be a probability based on resources. It doesn't address modern politics, it's not supposed to, the book is not about modern politics. It's about how the different areas of the world developed with different resources, and in various levels of isolation. Everything that happens after 1492 when the West hit the Americas is irrelevant to the discussion. Did you even read the book? I can't understand how you could read the book and think Argentina in 2018 is relevant to the discussion.

[Anonymous No.11371619]

Any historian that covers more than 200 years is a psued to the highest extent

[Anonymous No.11371662]

>>11371619
>Any historian that covers more than 200 years is a psued to the highest extent
yeah tottally..

[Anonymous No.11371753]

>>11370471
Diamond starts with his conclusion and goes about taking everything he knows about history as proof of it. Unfortunately, Diamond is not a historian and doesn't know very much about history. As a result, when the Spanish meet the Incas, the Incas are destroyed by the guns, germs and steel pretty much instantly, even though the process actually took several centuries (and, obviously, didn't consist of hundreds of years of deliberate warfare). When Cortés fights the Aztecs, he wins quite easily and due to factors beyond his control (guns, germs, steel and politics within the Aztec empire), even though the reason for his success is a topic of some debate with serious academics. He does a poor job of accounting for places like China and India, and skirts over their histories (longer than that of Europe) to fit them into his model.

[Anonymous No.11371785]

>>11370318

The history of Logos and the Logos of history.

Soon to be published by E. Michael Jones.

[Anonymous No.11371798]

>>11370318
berdyaev meaning of history

[Anonymous No.11371828]

>>11370471
>It wasn't their skin color
Obviously. IQ and psychological temperament were far more relevant. The fact that it's unwise to admit in mixed company that there are biological differences between peoples beyond the aesthetic doesn't mean that you should constrain your own freedom of thought within such a narrow artificial boundary.

[Anonymous No.11372025]

History of the Great American Fortunes by Gustavus Myers
Inventing Japan by Ian Buruma
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolome de las Casas

[Anonymous No.11372309]

>>11371785
>0 results in Google

lmao good luck selling dat shit Jones

[Anonymous No.11372498]

>>11370415
Same
>>11370318
The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History

[Anonymous No.11372500]

>>11371619
t. undeducated