>Covers all of western history from cavemen till 1814 (only because he died) >Took 40 years to write >11 volumes >13549 pages Has any other author done something on this scale?

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Anonymous Mon Jan 17 19:35:16 2022 No.19764794 [Reply] [Original]

>Covers all of western history from cavemen till 1814 (only because he died)
>Took 40 years to write
>11 volumes
>13549 pages
Has any other author done something on this scale?

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 19:36:30 2022 No.19764797 Doesn't matter because it's shit

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 19:36:57 2022 No.19764798 >>19764794 ..and it was all disproven by Kant

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 19:37:41 2022 No.19764801 >>19764794 Yes, any manchild like Bakker or Sanderson can write a lot more in less than 10 years

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 19:50:13 2022 No.19764852

>>19764794
>>19764797
This, it's not even that good, as he relegates like 5 pages to most people/events. The fact that it was written by one guy actually mars the work. If you want a general Western history read Peuples et civilizations or the Cambridge New Ancient, Medieval and Modern histories. Written by actual experts(not 'experts' as is used today)in their fields and they're actually detailed.
In fact the most insufferable online personality I've ever seen, Whatifalthist, worships these books. He convinced me the modern online history community has completely fallen, and though that's more due to American "education", Wikipedia and Paradox games than him personally, he's just representative of it. Talking as though he's an expert on every epoch of world history despite having a barely surface level understanding of most. Hmm, just like Durant.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 19:51:58 2022 No.19764862 >>19764794 The Holy Bible covers all history, present, and future in one volume.

>>	« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS Mon Jan 17 19:53:05 2022 No.19764864 >>19764862 Durant>>>>>>>>>> bibble

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 19:54:34 2022 No.19764874 >>19764797 >>19764852 I like it

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 19:55:30 2022 No.19764879
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William Vollmann wrote a 7 volume (3300 pages) analysis of violence. He did this while also writing several novels, short stories, and a 1344 page history on Imperial County, California.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:07:02 2022 No.19764939 >>19764852 Agreed. Hard to find anywhere online to discuss history without zoomers who have no knowledge past what they got from Wikipedia and Youtube shitting it up. Modern /his/ is terrible even compared to /his/ like 5 years ago.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:17:46 2022 No.19764998

>>19764852
His vids are ok to watch to fill time, but some of his takes seriously piss me off. He’s with medieval/early modern Europe but he’s pretty much a retard on every other topic. I also highly doubt he’s actually read Decline of the West like he’s said.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:18:59 2022 No.19765003 >>19764998 *he’s best

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:25:58 2022 No.19765037 File: 217 KB, 1280x656, 71YOQ8A7wWL.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19764794 Toynbee

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:28:06 2022 No.19765043 >>19764879 Who the fuck could write 1344 pages about one place in california?

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:30:19 2022 No.19765051

>>19764998
>He’s with medieval/early modern Europe
From what I've seen he's fairly knowledgeable about British, American and Canadian history but resorts to massive over generalizations about any other subject. He also goes full retard when discussing communism(no I'm not a commie but you don't need to be a total fucking sperg who acts as though communist polities are unique, totally ideologically driven entities and not just normal states that have a mixture of motivations for any action, to be against it). Also, as someone studying medieval history at Uni, I would also say it's a stretch to say he's knowledgeable about medieval history since he's had some awful videos on various subjects relating to it. If you look at any of his bookshelf threads or Twitter posts where he shows off books they tend to be very general histories(i.e; Durant, McNeill, Turchin) and often ones that are more polsci or anthropology than history which says a lot.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:31:32 2022 No.19765059 >>19765043 It's not that ridiculous. If you look hard enough you can find some 10 volume work published in like 1867 about basically any region in Western Europe.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:34:45 2022 No.19765068 >>19765051 I know a decent amount about early medieval, but never bothered with high medieval, and learned a lot about the era from him which is why I said that, probably not a good thing lol.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:35:52 2022 No.19765073 >>19765051 His weirdest take is how he seems to blame Greco Roman civilizations collapse entirely on Plato. I honestly don’t think he’s ever even read Plato lol.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:36:25 2022 No.19765077 >>19764879 >7 volume (3300 pages) analysis of violence. Is it good?

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:37:00 2022 No.19765080

>>19765043
Have you ever been involved in graduate school or known graduate students in the humanities? Your job as a grad student is to write a dissertation of several hundred pages on a very niche topic. I had a friend who was a Rhetoric PhD student who was writing her dissertation on the rhetoric of vegetarians in the US South-West. Before I left grad school I was planning on writing a dissertation on the feminist aesthetics of Kate Bush's music videos. This is just what researchers in academia do. I haven't read his book on Imperial County (obviously, I don't think nearly anyone really has), but the review in New York mag compares it to Moby-Dick; I'm assuming this means that it includes a lot of bare facts (like the passages in Moby-Dick about Right Whales & Sperm Whales) that transition to philosophic opining on larger topics. From what I've read Vollmann is a very introspective & thoughtful writer, so I'm sure it's actually pretty engaging.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:38:12 2022 No.19765087 File: 119 KB, 1280x726, Christ.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19764864 Wake me when "Durant" is the Alpha and Omega.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:39:32 2022 No.19765091 >>19765037 >>19764879 why are these cool multi volume series always so hard to find and also so expensive

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:39:45 2022 No.19765096

>>19765077
Never read it, I'm assuming it's prohibitively expensive, though I think there's an abridged single edition. I've only read 1 of his books, The Rainbow Stories, and he's a fun read. I'm sure there are people on /lit/ who have read more of him; I've seen threads about him.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:40:40 2022 No.19765099 >>19765037 Toynbee was a retard

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:41:13 2022 No.19765103 >>19764797 no buddy he didn't write your autobiography

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:42:27 2022 No.19765108 >>19765096 Nice, thanks anon

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:47:31 2022 No.19765137

>>19765108
He has a very interesting life story. His first major book was about how he tried to go to Afghanistan to fight with the Mujaheddin, but ended up just getting diarrhea and shitting his pants and pathetically returning to America. Then while he was a journalist in Bosnia he was the sole survivor of a mine explosion while traveling with other journalists.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:50:24 2022 No.19765153

>>19765080
Interesting he's seeking the essential nature of some blood god, through meditation on his various manifestations?

However, there's no way I'd let you post about your 300 page feminist kate bush wank without being laughed at, so

>HAHAHAHAHAA FAG AHAHA

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:52:05 2022 No.19765160 >>19765080 >Before I left grad school I was planning on writing a dissertation on the feminist aesthetics of Kate Bush's music videos Why lmao?

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 20:57:17 2022 No.19765186
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>>19765153
I don't mind you laughing at me. What's more embarrassing is that I only wrote like 15 pages of it before I decided to leave with my MA. A major reason I was writing it was so that she'd accept a request for an interview.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:01:13 2022 No.19765208

>>19765160
Inspiration struck me during a Hitchcock seminar I took. Most Hitchcock academic criticism is based in feminist & Lacanian psychoanalysis interpretations, so I got pretty versed in feminist film criticism. Then I learned that Kate (who I was obsessed with at the time) considered Hitchcock a big inspiration in her music & videos (for example, the famous Psycho string line is in her song "Experiment IV"). So I figured this was unexplored territory in academia and it'd give me an excuse to watch/listen to Kate Bush for 6 hours a day.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:07:00 2022 No.19765240 >>19765208 also, I wanted to have sex with her

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:11:43 2022 No.19765267 >>19765037 came here to post Toynbee (who is better than Durant)

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:14:05 2022 No.19765279 >>19764794 Loads of authors have written trite shite full of lies.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:15:07 2022 No.19765288 >>19765240 That was implicit in the interview.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:22:17 2022 No.19765325 >>19765240 I'd never do that. She's far too pure & important than me.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:36:21 2022 No.19765396

>>19764794
Professional Historian's opinion, I don't care for him much. One of my first major research projects dealt with "conceptual history" and how to conceive of history in terms of scope, scale, and periodization. For the project I did a tremendous amount of research, covering everything from the long durée, to so-called deep history, everyday history, the different concepts of religious and philosophical history in terms of Christianity and Eastern faiths, and even crazy alternate histories like this one Russian history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)) which was a lot of fun. Durant does a poor job of finding some kind of analytical framework, concept, theory, etc. to unite his interpretation. It's just not very sophisticated.

>>19765037
>>19765267
Also here, I know a great deal after assisting in the preparation for a Toynbee dedicated lecture series that awards a nice honorarium once a year to a person for a big ideas talk. Toynbee is much better, even if he's not very well received because of his moralizing, but at least he had a framework of concentrating upon civilization as a unit of study like the art historian Clarke. Mainstream historians lampooned him because they're all afraid of larger ideas and broader concepts and fall under the influence of aethistic marxists.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:41:32 2022 No.19765423

>>19764852
Historian here once again. This analysis sums up my opinion well. The Cambridge histories are extraordinarily useful, well-written, professional, and well-documented. May I also recommend for our German-reading colleagues the Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte. It provides an excellent source for good, readable, detailed history. Jürgen Kocka's contributions blow everyone else's away.

Youtubers and wiki are intentionally trying to make people idiots to control the population. Wikis are about as evil and policed as reddit.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 21:46:45 2022 No.19765451
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>>19765043
Easy, I'm friends with a local historian in Germany. There are literally millions of documents in his archive for his little region. You could write your entire life about a single metro area and never run out of things to write.
I was looking for a criminal case that occurred in the 1850s in one German city. Going through the "N" section alone for 5 years of the 1850s yielded dozens of sensational murder crimes/trials. You wouldn't believe the number of documents that exist in European Archives.
Imagine one page like this in a book of 500 pages that covers half a year to a year of crimes in which the defendant has an N last name.

>>19765080
This guy knows.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:06:19 2022 No.19765558 >>19765423 >Wikis are about as evil and policed as reddit. True, except for Wikispooks. What's your alma mater, Historianon?

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:08:13 2022 No.19765567

>>19764794
Regardless of what the other “professional historians” (I have claim of being one myself in Classics) and what say in this thread Durant is kino.

I doubt they have read him - his prose blows any Cambridge history out of the water; or even the vast majorities of modern historians.

Additionally, since he had his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia, he was an extremely intelligent and well read man. It reflects when discussing the intellectual history of the ‘West’, the strong point of the series imo.

>>19765396
He addresses this in this books over and over again. He doesn’t give a shit about specialized historians looking down their nose on him.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:08:25 2022 No.19765569 >>19765043 Look around on Gutenberg and you will see 30 volume histories of basically any place on Earth

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:10:37 2022 No.19765577 >>19765558 It was a top 10 USA university. I did do research fellowships and postdocs in Europe. Wikis today serve as a terrible means of erasing knowledge because EVEN HISTORIANS are so lazy that you hear them repeat untruths from there.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:15:34 2022 No.19765602

>>19765567
You may have missed my point. I love broad ideas about history and there are great synthesizers of history. One of my favorite historians is Jürgen Osterhammel who has these huge world historical narratives. He unites them with a framework, like Toynbee did, and that's Durant's failure. What he does is fancy. At the time he was writing, the great narratives had been written of the nineteenth century celebrating different ideas of progress or degeneration or even the "closing of the American Frontier" which turned americans away from their rugged individuality (FJ Turner thesis), and even if that's not entirely convincing, it's still an idea that those people put forward.

Durant doesn't really have a consistent idea of history. He's just spinning and weaving tales. One doesn't have to be rigid, but they should have a disciplined way of thinking in which events are ordered. Otherwise it's just postmodern nonsense.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:15:43 2022 No.19765603 >>19765577 >EVEN HISTORIANS Historians are people too, anon. And people are lazy pieces of shit. We know this. I basically just tune out anyone not talking about a primary source. t. bachelors-fag

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:18:13 2022 No.19765614

>>19764879
>3300 pages
From the wikipedia:
>Generally, Vollmann maintains that violence is justifiable only in cases of immediate self-defence and defense of innocents - on higher, politically organized levels, justifications of violence are likely to lead to the harm of innocents.
The dullest most typical opinion it is possible to have. Also broadly rendered meaningless by the "defence of innocents" casus belli which could be applied with EXTREME subjectivity.
>that nation is capitalist, innocent workers are being oppressed, therefore we must protect the innocent
>that nation is suppressing human rights and locking minorities up in camps! we must protect the innocent
>that person is spreading hate/degeneracy, harming society and literally killing children, we must protect the innocent
And of course this policy would permit intervention in literally any armed conflict. Just pick whichever side is "in the right" and claim it's either innocent or fighting to protect the innocent.
A complete waste of paper. No wonder this work is almost entirely ignored.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:21:40 2022 No.19765624 File: 1.90 MB, 594x565, 1640958739381.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19765602 >Otherwise it's just postmodern nonsense.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:22:15 2022 No.19765627

>>19765614
I think you're proving >>19765577 right. You're basing an interpretation of a 3300 page work, which probably has a lot of nuance, to a few ideas glossed by a wiki editor. Again, I haven't read this work so I can't defend it (I only brought it up because it was relevant to the thread) but you shouldn't dismiss years of work based on a wikipedia article.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:23:00 2022 No.19765628 >>19765451 >You could write your entire life about a single metro area and never run out of things to write. And no one will ever give a shit about it. >>19765602 >He's just spinning and weaving tales. And this is precisely why Durant is superior.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:25:58 2022 No.19765635 >>19765451 Very interesting. I'd love to write a book like this but not being able to get published due to lack of education is demotivating.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:26:03 2022 No.19765636 Churchill's WW2 series is pretty hefty

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:32:06 2022 No.19765650

>>19765602
His overarching “framework” is that of the intellectual history of the West. It’s not outright stated, because he covers a significant amount of material beyond or even superfluous to that. He isn’t postmodern at all and actually extremely modern. Fundamentally the ‘West’ is a uniting principal for his work and one that would be dismissed today. Admittedly, he is focused on creating a interesting, perhaps you would call it a fable, but story or narrative is better, for each book within itself. But the object of these was to introduce people to the era and they could read other works to solidify their knowledge.

I don’t understand why you need that framework. Again, the prose is the main draw! It’s insanely comfy and Durant with his wife have genial and urban disposition that’s reflected in these books.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:33:09 2022 No.19765659 >>19765650 urbane

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:33:22 2022 No.19765661

>>19765635
There's literally no reason not to self-publish. Manuscript formatting software is easy to use, ebooks sell well enough, and print on demand is perfectly adequate. You don't need an advance when you could simply hop on welfare during the writing process.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:35:09 2022 No.19765670 >>19765661 >There's literally no reason not to self-publish Being made fun of and no one taking you seriously is one reason

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:37:17 2022 No.19765685 >>19765627 Of course I'm not about to give a wiki editor more credibility than he's due but I've got to work with what I've got.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:41:44 2022 No.19765701 File: 305 KB, 640x701, EE8C914E-CDF2-49EB-985B-080100B6C464.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19765628 Based

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:41:54 2022 No.19765702 >>19765670 >being made fun of Sorry, didn't realize you were a 14 year old girl. Trust me, it gets better.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:45:03 2022 No.19765718

>>19765702
It's beyond pathetic. You probably call yourself a writer yet no one would consider you one. No one is going to read or take seriously a self published history book from a nobody off the street and publishing companies blacklist self published authors.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:48:12 2022 No.19765729

>>19765628
That's not true. The people that live in that area are a great source of revenue and they do in fact read. Histories of places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Potsdam, Prague, they all do very well. Montaillou is one such place made famous by one very well done work. But also think of historical examples.

Balzac writes extensively about Parisian life, Flaubert one small country village, Parisian life, Dostoyevsky in a prison, a small village in "x province", Kyoto is another such place.

You're mistaken.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:50:26 2022 No.19765733

>>19765635
I'd say go for it. I trained myself to read foreign languages and the philology necessary to read old documents. Go to BYUs website, they'll teach you for free. You need motivation and practice.

I learned to read old French, Italian, German, and Dutch script from the BYU website.

You can go to just about any archive in person without writing first, and private archives you have to ask. But just go. It's fun and they want you to use the sources.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:56:52 2022 No.19765764

>>19765650
This isn't to sound snooty at all, and I do appreciate the West, and am unpopular for thinking Western Civ and the Canon are awesome (I've even been shouted at by a room of radical feminist/post modernists at a conference more than once!) but I think you need more when you do history. He's like Doris Kearns Goodwin, who mines the historians works, steals some of their ideas, and has a team of grad students write and revise her books.

You don't understand why you need a framework because you're not professionally trained, which is okay. The science of history is broad and open ended and you can do it without training. But just about everyone agrees, history needs an analysis to be history, otherwise it's chronology, chronicals, chronographs, anecdotes, stories, etc.

Intellectual history is interesting in that it is basically all history, isn't it? You can't tell econ, political, cultural, religious, history, etc without intellectual history!

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:58:11 2022 No.19765771

>>19765661
This guy is right to write. You should just go for it. I met an old cougar at a starbucks who wrote shitty "one day" historical novels and self-published them on amazon. She sold them to English learners. Made like 25-30k a year.

>>19765670
Who cares?

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 22:59:12 2022 No.19765776 >>19765685 There are professional review articles, but they're also sour grapes sometimes. People think you're not intelligent unless you criticize something for some reason.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:00:23 2022 No.19765778 >>19765718 Not at all. I've known a few examples of people who were excellent, unappreciated, and they became much more appreciated after self-publishing. Just make sure that someone else thinks your idea is interesting too.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:02:39 2022 No.19765785 >>19765137 Kek, now it sounds really interesting

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:03:23 2022 No.19765789 >>19765778 >Not at all. I've known a few examples of people who were excellent, unappreciated, and they became much more appreciated after self-publishing. Did they ever get published?

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:04:15 2022 No.19765791 >>19765789 Yes, at least two examples I can think of, and now a third, Proust.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:06:45 2022 No.19765797 >>19765764 What is wrong with chronology? Or a collection of engaging anecdotes? Seems like a good place to start then the reader can form their own understanding, and if they are interested, then go on to find evidence in primary sources.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:08:07 2022 No.19765802

>>19765789
>>19765791
Two famous examples i just thought of, Eckart Kehr, and Raul Hilberg. Kehr was prevented from publishing his book by conservatives in the 1930s, self-published his dissertation, then he was rediscovered and celebrated.
Raul Hilberg was blocked from all major publishers, had to go with a minor press, for which he paid, and then became the most accurate holocaust historian for numbers (He claims it was only 5.2-5.4 million jews which went against the narrative of the Shoah Foundation and Simon Wiesenthal). Hannah Arendt blocked his work so she could steal it.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:09:12 2022 No.19765805 >>19765797 That's not really history. The Historian's Task is to order that chronology and make sense of it through an analysis. It's about creating order from chaos.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:09:54 2022 No.19765808

>>19765802
>>19765791
None of that has to do with self publishing on Amazon in 2022 lol. I've heard from a few people that you will get blacklisted for self publishing and then every publisher will turn you down for eternity when they google your name and see you self published. It's not worth it.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:11:54 2022 No.19765813
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>>19764794
There's no reason to read any history book that's this general, they're just glorified timelines. Any book that tries to deal with "all of western civilization" without strongly emphasizing some thesis or framework to go along with it is a waste of time.
Pic related. I won't say I regret reading it, but you could condense everything Barzun says that's actually interesting into a large pamphlet. The rest is just name-dropping, contrarianism (leaving out Don Quixote in favor of Lazarillo de Tormes, and then giving a summary of Lazarillo that fails to say anything meaningful about it beyond "it isn't Don Quixote"), and condensed versions of things he thinks you know already. There's no structure or argument to the book at all, and it feels like something only a 90 year-old academic with perfect career security could get away with publishing.
Obviously Barzun isn't Durant, but finishing his book made me not want to read anything like it ever again.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:13:20 2022 No.19765817 >>19765813 What would you recommend to read then?

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:14:26 2022 No.19765822 >>19765808 Well, it depends on what kind and where. Academic presses are sometimes hungry for work.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:14:38 2022 No.19765823 File: 101 KB, 1032x1194, 15.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19765817 The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, by Beatrix Potter https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14872/14872-h/14872-h.htm

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:16:45 2022 No.19765836

>>19765813
They write these books in the hopes of selling coffee table, bathroom, xmas gift books or assigning them to classes to read. Simon Schama is one of these types. These people have lots of money, influence, and graduate students. They often try too hard and accomplish too little and hope, by way of inclusion and omission to shape future narratives and future thinking on a subject.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:21:39 2022 No.19765853 >>19765817 Start with the Greeks... Then the Romans. Then the middle ages and so on.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:28:28 2022 No.19765876 >>19764797 It's good though. I've read four of them. >>19764852 The "experts" in academia have Durant glowing reviews at the time.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:36:15 2022 No.19765904

>>19765080
This is also why credentials hate shit like Durant. Durant got rich and got to travel around the world going to historical sights, taking private tours of archives and museums while chatting with professors about his big picture history. They have to spend 12 months studying the archeological records and documentation of early medieval toe nail clippers in Iberia. As vengeance, they'll tell you to read anthologies of disconnected journal articles written for academics in the same rat race, whose real goal is to get tenure and get big enough to write a big coherent history.

>>19764852
Case in point.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:37:41 2022 No.19765912 >>19765904 >>19765876 Agreed

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:45:23 2022 No.19765937 >>19765805 Perhaps that's not the best way to approach history. History is not science, nor is truth ever going to be found. Just tell some stories, the reader might be better for it. >>19765808 Just use a pen name. Google isn't magic.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:47:55 2022 No.19765952 >>19765802 >5.2 - 5.4 million jews >accurate lol

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:51:53 2022 No.19765974 >>19765091 Because printing many books is expensive and won't cost as one book. And when they go out of print, the prices of used stuff rises since it gets harder and harder to get a complete set.

Anonymous Mon Jan 17 23:58:25 2022 No.19766001

>>19765937
That's one philosophy of history, and no one really ever believed in a completely TRUTHful history, that's a strawman created by a new 20th century generation of historians that was too lazy to read the Quellenkritik of the 19th century on which all systematic historical inquiry was founded. This devolved into a situation in which two famous episodes of fraud were outed, historians took sides, and a great many said "Let;s just tell stories" while the others wrote serious history.

Serious historians do also get handsome rewards for being good at their job. Organizations pay top dollar to big thinkers to explain things like the economic growth of the Kaiserreich during the 1870s or the soviet union during the 1920s to get an idea of how to follow suit. Econ historians get paid to fly out and hang out and get 10 grand to speak for an hour. Then they return home, bill all their expenses to their accounts at the university, and someone promotes them to a name chair and they get 500,000 and a team of slaves to do research.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 00:05:05 2022 No.19766023 >>19764801 Sandersons writing speed is actually insane

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 00:11:50 2022 No.19766041 >>19766023 The power of an author who actually likes writing and doesn't have some kind of self destructive addiction

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 00:38:10 2022 No.19766122 >>19765614 yeah dude I'm sure one sentence on a Wikipedia article edited by some dude who read a few reviews online is a 100% accurate and nuanced view of the work.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 00:45:49 2022 No.19766146
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>>19765567
>his prose blows any Cambridge history out of the water; or even the vast majorities of modern historians.
Because apparently good prose and having good, detailed information are totally incompatible.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 00:48:33 2022 No.19766154 Story of Civilization is basically a history of Western literature/philosophy with a few pages of political events thrown in-between to give context.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 01:27:12 2022 No.19766263

>>19766154
Also it overemphasizes french thinks, the Dutch need their day and Germans are much more important than he realized earlier than the 19th century.
Medieval history has come really far, as has the interconnected strands of world hit to Europe since he wrote

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 02:24:34 2022 No.19766391

>>19765043
>>19765080
>>19765904
>>19765912
Small brained childish imbeciles utterly incapable of comprehending depth and complexity, they want all subjects to bow to their bedtime story obsessed simplistic narrative nonsense. Happy historians have finally shed the burden of these idiots in the last few decades. Stick to fiction and religion

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 02:27:24 2022 No.19766405 >>19765937 >nor is truth ever going to be found. Just tell some stories, the reader might be better for it. Fuck off idiot

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 02:47:14 2022 No.19766469
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>>19766001
I also have no plans to join the premier league or become a rockstar. Playing winner take all stakes is too risky for me. I'll just learn a little about whatever I feel like and leave psychohistory to the fraudsters or whoever.

>>19766405
Do you even know the word epistemology?

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 03:34:15 2022 No.19766600

>>19764794
I've only got my opinion on it from reading his Late Antiquity section since thats what I know well. It's filled with 'half-right' or at times just wrong stuff. What pisses me off is the half-right stuff, born out of oversimplifications and just brings people to wrong conclusions if they think about it, makes the people seem stupid or look like they have no idea what they are doing or what's their justification. It is nothing more than a very simple and obviouly biased narrative history.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 03:51:07 2022 No.19766650

>>19764852
To be fair, it's more fun to shitpost about borders and say Aachen actually lays claim to all that is holy and good in Europe because of Paradox games.
Something something, fuck Austrians, something something Hungary literally who? something something Byznantineblob, something something the Siege of Liege.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 03:57:58 2022 No.19766673

I feel like I'd need to take a semester to learn how to read this stuff.
How to find information, how to glean it from a generalized book, when to dive into the actual letters such and such general wrote.
Basically how not to waste your own fucking time.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 04:01:44 2022 No.19766684 >>19765733 >BYU website. Not him, but you mean this one? https://byuonline.byu.edu/home

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 04:04:04 2022 No.19766692 >>19765771 > She sold them to English learners. Like her own students?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 04:06:47 2022 No.19766698 >>19766001 What do you think of Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy? I'm in interested in history as a profession, but history jobs and pay is really poor in my third world country.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 04:13:27 2022 No.19766715

>>19765567
>He doesn’t give a shit about specialized historians looking down their nose on him.
Nor does the homeless crack addict masturbating using his own shit as lubricant.

I invite neither into my home. The crack addict, at least, is not purporting to be something he isn't.

>>19765628
Enjoy wanking with shit mate.

>>19765764
>You can't tell econ, political, cultural, religious, history, etc without intellectual history!
Nice idealism. Putting a large causative theory prior to your study is a great way to lose kidneys in reviews.

>>19765797
What's wrong is when they purport to be history. Remember that time a religious poet wrote a literary exploration of going out to the countryside and hundreds of Western commentators claimed that he was a great historian for writing down the lies he heard this one time at General Administration of Camps?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 04:16:00 2022 No.19766719 >>19764874 W-W--W--WHAT YOU CANT JUST LIKE SOMETHING I DISLIKE YOU CANT DO THAT YOU'RE RETARDED NO NO NO STOP IT!!!!

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 04:38:56 2022 No.19766775 >>19766715 I can tell you are jewish because you found it necessary to bring up your scat fetish.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 05:11:33 2022 No.19766821 >>19764852 >If you want a general Western history read the Cambridge New Ancient, Medieval and Modern histories. You seem like you know your shit. Got anything that's about 1000 pages total for, you know, a first pass?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 05:41:24 2022 No.19766888 >>19764801 >Doesn't realize that Will Durant didn't have a PC or the Internet during the era he wrote this.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 05:49:42 2022 No.19766911 >>19765208 >Most Hitchcock academic criticism is based in feminist & Lacanian psychoanalysis interpretations, Ew No thanks

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 05:56:15 2022 No.19766927 >>19765080 >Before I left grad school I was planning on writing a dissertation on the feminist aesthetics of Kate Bush's music videos. This is the most ridiculous sentence I have ever read

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 06:12:11 2022 No.19766960 >>19764794 And yet, it is still 4× shorter than longer fanfiction on the internet...

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 06:12:25 2022 No.19766961

>>19765805
Today I learned I'm not a fan of history but of chronology.
I read civilization of the middle ages by Norman F cantor and all the little aside snide remarks and opinions really put me off. It's one of three books I've ever started and not finished.
Conversely I'm really loving the fall of Carthage by Adrian goldsworthy because it sticks mostly to facts and while it mentions certain traditions or stories also includes which ones are suspect and why.
If anyone has a quick overview recc for middle age Europe I would really like that, I just started getting interested in history and think an overview would be good then from there I can take smaller pieces that interest me and focus on them.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 06:44:54 2022 No.19767046 >>19766600 Can you give some examples?

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 07:23:12 2022 No.19767129

>>19767046
His criticism of Gratian of
>Left the government to corrupt officals who put every office up for sale
This is essentially Roman virtue signaling and doesn't mean anything to the actual running of the state since it was a part of Roman culture. Not to mention it is obtuse. It could be referring to payments to your superior, which eveyone had to do by law or the promotion price, which was half part of legal practice and half part of the Patron culture the Romans held.

>The Imperial governor there, Butheric
Butheric wasn't a governer but a Magister Militum. He didn't govern.

>Valentinian II was assassinated
While I agree with it there isn't enough detail given to why exactly somebody would think that. He died by hanging which was presumably suicide or an attempt to make him look like he did. The context to the event isn't given.

>Theodosius' sons lost control of their administration
This isn't true for Arcadius, he took hold of his government and had active efforts in law and managing the military by his 20's. He was not an idle puppet, he actively and sucessfully resisted strongmen from both administration and military.

>Alaric speech
He just makes this up

>Radagaisus with 200,000 men
An impossible number and just accepted.

All this from 2.2 of 'The Age of Faith'.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 09:30:05 2022 No.19767464 >>19764798 based

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 09:38:21 2022 No.19767501 >>19765080 >>19765208 Just listened to Kate Bush 'Experiment IV', why am i hooked?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 09:41:44 2022 No.19767510 >>19766888 Good point, also checked

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 09:48:21 2022 No.19767539 If the academic historybro is still here, any advice for an undergrad studying history?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 09:49:24 2022 No.19767542 >>19764794 quality over quantity

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 09:59:06 2022 No.19767582
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>>19766821
Not him but The Rise of the West. It's much shorter, but also broader in scope and it has a central focus to tie it together (how did Europe go from periphery to global dominance?). More technology and economics than Durant, though, and a lot less philosophy, so depends what you're looking for.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 10:21:00 2022 No.19767683

>>19764852
>In fact the most insufferable online personality I've ever seen, Whatifalthist
I like some of his alternate history videos but the man’s geopolitical videos are just his opinion on things presented as fact.

>>19764939
>Modern /his/ is terrible even compared to /his/ like 5 years ago.
Modern /his/ is where leftypol and /pol/ go to fight one another

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 10:23:22 2022 No.19767696 >>19767683 Agreed, the political bait threads are godawful but even the 'history' threads(where there are any)get shit up by le epic memes and Wikipedia screenshots.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 10:42:41 2022 No.19767792 >>19764794 >Covers all of western history >all Ha

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 10:44:14 2022 No.19767799 >>19764879 are you Leaf by Leaf

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 10:49:01 2022 No.19767822 >>19765186 Based waifufags

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 10:53:20 2022 No.19767841 >>19764794 Toynbee

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 10:58:48 2022 No.19767862 >>19765567 >his prose The absolute state of /lit/ >historians

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 11:55:31 2022 No.19768187 >>19767862 If you were stuck reading the drudgery that is the vast majority of academia, like I'm forced too, you would appreciate it.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 12:40:19 2022 No.19768444

>>19766692
No, like Indians, she was a real estate agent/divorcee who never worked. She had a porsche.
>>19766698
It's a classic, and the guy that trained me had courses with him, so naturally he, and others assigned the book.

>>19766821
Look at Osterhammel.

>>19766684
Paleography
https://script.byu.edu/Pages/the-german-documents-pages/the-german-documents(english)

>>19766961
Jacques le Goff is a bit tedious, but great for that. I have several "Middle ages" books, but they've changed the terminology because Middle ages has implications that it sucked and was between something in an eschatological sense. So owe say medieval now more than anything. Twighlight of the Middle ages by Huizinga is a classic that's also AWESOME.

>>19767539
You need to learn at least 2 languages other than english no matter your field. The reason why is because Grad Schools, or at least good programs, require certifications in it. I had 1 hour to translate a document about the discovery of Rosa Luxembourg's corpse for German and I also had to translate a piece of literature from french in one hour. You also need to learn skills, make friends with faculty who have published good works and have extensive networks, and start looking at research skills that translate into a career like politics or think tanks. Those are the people who try to hire me know.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 12:41:20 2022 No.19768448 >>19767683 >>19767696 I went for a bit but it was too insufferable and the same questions relating to current politics seemed to be about all they spoke.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 12:46:09 2022 No.19768470

>>19767539
Additionally, consider training yourself in the major disputes of what you want to study now. I'll tell you that public history, legal history, corporate history, history of neutrality, outsiders of all sort history, food history are becoming real growth fields whereas environmental history, transnational history, are fading.

You need to read read read and work on your prose as best you can. I was thrown offers from every school I applied to and got phone calls to get me to go because of my writing sample and GRE scores (99%). The GRE has changed now to make it easier for idiots, so you have to make sure you have the absolute best score.

As a historian you are a writer and a reader. Look at Hexter to learn what a historian's day is like.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 12:53:36 2022 No.19768503 >>19768470 And where are you now?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 12:55:09 2022 No.19768512 >>19766469 wtf happened

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 13:08:18 2022 No.19768589

>>19768444
Maybe you would be willing and able to answer a bit of a dumb question.
Goldsworthy referenced tribes in cisalpine gaul as Gallic. Makes sense, but the he uses the same term for people Hannibal met before even getting close to the Alps and again for some peoples near Greece and greater Europe.
Was all of none Rome/Greek/Iberian Europe one group with a same language?
Is there any good history written just about the Gauls and how they lived / what they did before getting rekt by rome or does that not exist because they didn't write?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 13:11:35 2022 No.19768610 >>19768512 Chicago avenue in Minneapolis A certain group came to town and when they do places get smashed

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 16:08:15 2022 No.19769468 >>19766391 What about the sad historians?

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 16:25:11 2022 No.19769557
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>>19768503
I do odd jobs, editing, research, I sit on a few boards, stay at home with tots, my wife works at home, makes triple what I did teaching, so I'm stay at home parent.
I restore the old house, build outdoor things, and work off handyman jobs for friends and neighbors. I get free hardwood so it's not a bad gig.

Like this desk and shelf, I did that

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 16:26:49 2022 No.19769568 >>19769557 post a closer up pic of your shelf

>>	Cool Hand Mike Tue Jan 18 16:29:58 2022 No.19769587 >>19764864 Yet again butterfly proves to be a fucking retard

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 16:35:11 2022 No.19769614

>>19764852
My background is in Classics so I'm only qualified to speak to that, but I don't like this take. There's always someone like this in any thread on synoptic popular history. "Don't read Gibbon or Livy, they're not peer-reviewed." To me this is the worst form of pedantry because it's not even valid snobbery, it's usually someone with middling credentials trying to lord them over people who know nothing, people who are just starting out their learning. This is by necessity, because nobody else would need an "expert's" opinion on the subject. Anyone with even a bit of experience would know they don't need expert permission to read a sweeping, synoptic, imperfect but engaging popular history, one that introduces them to thousands of things they need to know, like basic chronology, major names, events, etc. Someone with even a little bit of experience knows how to take a book like Durant's apart and make it work for him, and if it doesn't work for him, he knows to discard it.

The only time expertise (snobby pedantry) like this is needed is when contextualising or critiquing something specific, like if a book is notorious for factual errors or omissions, or it's a notably narrow representation of a methodological or ideological perspective (like an idiosyncratic Marxist history of the antique economy, if the person considering reading it is just looking for a general overview of society in the ancient world). Short of that, any book like Durant's is perfectly fine as grist for the mill, as long as you ENJOY reading it, for the exact same reason that five high school textbooks or Harper Torchbooks editions you fondly remember from childhood are perfectly fine.

There's a big difference between "should I cite Durant in my university paper?" and "is it okay if I learned who Cicero is from Durant?" The vast majority of readers are either entry level, in which case anything basically factually accurate and engaging will do just to start them off and keep them invested, or intermediate level, in which case they already know how to distinguish a popular book from a scholarly one, and to take what they need from each.

I understand /lit/ is for snobbery and pedantry and that is usually a good thing, but when it's just intermediate-level people gatekeeping newbies I don't like it. I'll never use Reddit, but I imagine Reddit goes too far in the opposite direction, recommending any popular crap because having standards is evil or whatever. I'm not going that far, I'm just saying that there's nothing wrong with reading Toynbee or even Spengler IF IT GETS YOU READING and you have the minimum necessary wherewithal to know they aren't peer-reviewed by 2022 standards. But then neither are older editions of the Cambridge Ancient History, which use many "outdated" concepts (which frankly makes them more interesting and stimulating than anything "current"). Real scholars read both the new and the old for their methods and perspectives anyway.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 16:52:10 2022 No.19769695

>>19764852
>He convinced me the modern online history community has completely fallen, and though that's more due to American "education", Wikipedia and Paradox games than him personally, he's just representative of it. Talking as though he's an expert on every epoch of world history despite having a barely surface level understanding of most. Hmm, just like Durant.
I think it's exactly the opposite of what you are implying here. The online community needs to read MORE things like Durant, not fewer. The problem isn't that they're reading the wrong books, it's that they're not reading at all. They play the Paradox games and browse Wikipedia and watch Youtube videos and they assume their broad but shallow knowledge is enough, because nobody ever puts pressure on them to develop further from there. they hit a plateau and can't figure out where to go next. Academia is the opposite, so focused on "up to date," "specialist" knowledge that it's actually pathetic how little it forces students and scholars to learn the basic details of their own fields. I knew more Roman history as a teenager with a library card who was into it for fun than people I know now who live in Rome and teach advanced seminars on Roman pottery, the kinds of people who know all the "current" studies to cite in their footnotes, but they forget the basic chronology of the ancient world and couldn't find Alba Longa or Ostia on a map.

I'd still rather have a class full of Paradox game nerds than a class full of rich spoiled kids who are already convinced they're geniuses because they went to Ivy League feeder schools. Give me a room full of high school dropouts from /his/ and the authority to electrocute them if they goof off, and I'll give you a bunch of kids who have read Niebuhr and Mommsen and know Latin like it's their first language.

If someone could spark a movement that takes the raw material of Paradox playing Youtube scholars and somehow motivates it to apply itself, they could supplant dying academia through sheer autism and drive. The problem isn't getting them to read "better" books, as defined by dying academia. There's no shortage of useless people skimming the latest greatest archaeology papers on the discursive intertextuality of Roman numismatics and still having no actual thoughts in their heads. The problem is getting amateurs to read any books at all and transcend their amateurism. If you could just get them to read on their own initiative, doesn't matter what, they would quickly reach the intermediate stage where they can then direct their own further reading, and also see how much more reading they ought to do, and form their own opinions on recent scholarship as well.

That's why I'm against perpetuating the myth that the experts have snobby opinions (or are even entitled to snobby opinions) about Durant. Who cares what the supposed pottery expert who doesn't know where Ostia is thinks? Give me a dilettante who has read Livy cover to cover over her any day.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 16:52:25 2022 No.19769698

>>19769614
Different anon here, but what if a non scholar were to write a book for the masses using scholarly sources as their basis, is the book then not scholarly?
Also if I were to reference Gibbon in a discussion with a historian would they look down on it like a wiki reference.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 16:56:56 2022 No.19769722

>>19769614
Except he's hardly even a good intro. It's too brief to give you a very detailed view on anything he covers, most of the books recommended will be hard to find today and were basically 20s & 30s pop history books, he has factual inaccuracies(>>19767129). It's honestly hardly a step up from Wikipedia, and at least Wikipedia often has okay citations. He also hardly has a 'method or perspective' to offer as it's again basically a synthesis of 20s & 30s pop history and some published, translated primary works. It's not like reading an old but important scholar like Amari or Caetani. If you like Durant for his literary talent, very well just be aware it's not at all a good work. Nor did I say don't read primary sources and only read modern academics. You are right, I should have recommended different books though.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 17:11:32 2022 No.19769789

>>19769695
>>19769722
I also don't think every beginner need to read the most up to date book on every single topic(the books I originally recommended are not the absolute latest scholarship). If you read a book from the 60s that actually goes in depth into the sources and various problems, even if today there's new evidence or questions are framed differently, etc. that in my opinion is great anyway since at least you're critically thinking about the subject. However a lot of the books I pointed out are hardly even history books but political science or anthropology with a ton of anecdotes packed in, and this is exemplified in the channel.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 17:13:01 2022 No.19769799 >>19764794 Gibbon's decline and fall of Rome 98-1590 AD (all three volumes) Hume's History of England 55BC-1688AD

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 17:27:29 2022 No.19769874

>>19769722
>It's honestly hardly a step up from Wikipedia, and at least Wikipedia often has okay citations
I just checked his book on rome and his citations take up 22 pages and his bibliography takes up 8 pages (with certain titles marked if you are looking for further study), what are you talking about? Is this some regurgitation from the fotm youtuber?

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 17:39:09 2022 No.19769917

>>19769874
Yeah, I addressed that. I know he has bibliographies and I just checked the same book, it would be hard to find a good chunk of them today apart from the really standout ones like Syme or Mommsen and the primary works. So it was ok in the 40s when the book came out but nowadays the bibliography is largely pointless which is why I said in that regard Wikipedia is often better. I don't know who fotm is.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 17:55:35 2022 No.19770010

>>19765567
Nice that a Classics bro agrees. Also agree that Durant's prose is great.

>>19765602
>>19765396
This is the kind of thing I meant in my long posts just above. I mean no offence but it sounds like you wrote a standard lit review on Begriffsgeschichte and you know about basic methods survey stuff like the frontier thesis, Alltagsgeschichte, Braudel, the roots of modern views of time in the teleological and eschatological time-conceptions of "historical" religions like the Abrahamic faiths. I'm a classicist so maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't your discipline look down more on Toynbee types far more than simple popularisers, precisely because of their strong "metanarratives?" I'm sure you read White for your methods thing?

I really think this sort of gatekeeping is why academia sucks, it's smoke and mirrors for showing off guild membership to non-members instead of trying to actually maintain the decadent guild's internal standards. I just don't like the whole tone of it.

>>19769722
What defines a good intro? My intro was a French high school textbook I found on the street when I was a teenager, "Wikipedia binging," and reading primary sources I barely understood at first. You kick the ladder away when you no longer need it. Again I mean no offence but I suspect this sort of thing is splitting hairs with an ulterior motive. The main priority seems to be having a strong "insider" or "expert opinion," even about something that simply doesn't warrant one, because one of the benefits of guild membership is showing it off. I certainly agree that Durant won't be right for everyone, but they can figure that out on their own and transcend or discard the book when necessary. There's just nothing that stands out about the series so much that people need to be cautioned away from it. If anything that would be more plausible with Toynbee. To me it smells like one of those memes like "Lovecraft's prose is terrible." Is it? Do you REALLY think that?

>>19769698
Scholarly is a relative term, I would recommend thinking of it in terms of the real people and the institutions they inhabit (and gatekeep), rather than timeless essences like "scholarliness." Many of the people who are today generally regarded as "scholarly" were themselves considered dangerous popularisers, political or ideological activists, or simply unscholarly a generation or two ago, when French structuralism and poststructuralism, and anthropological and sociological methods were controversial in the academy. Now the norm is to write like Foucault and have a background in anthropology, and anything focused on "great" politics, people, and events is considered vulgar and "popular." Today it's easier to get people to listen to you about liminal queer subjectivities than about the influence of the defeat of the Spanish Armada on English politics. This is exaggerating but not by that much.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 17:56:40 2022 No.19770014

So the question becomes, whose respect do you want? If you want to write popular books, do you need the respect of academia? A lot of academics get their fancy PhDs and then alternate between despising "pop" books and the plebs who read them, and dreaming of writing a book with actual popular appeal, because it's notoriously hard to do it. The days when educated laypeople valued academic books are mostly over, and the popular market is dominated by professional popularisers who know how to write entertaining (but often shallow) things rather than worrying about being up to date on liminal queer subjectivities.

Some academics do manage to write popular books, and some of the non-academic popularisers are up to date with the scholarly literature. But you have to ask yourself whether you want to be in one of these categories and why.

If the question is: can you as a non-academic/layperson learn, read, appreciate, and make use of scholarly sources for your own knowledge and for whatever you want to write, then yes absolutely. With effort you may even find that you've read a lot more than the academics, because they rely so much on overviews, canned summaries, and stereotyped "standard narratives" from their introductory classes that they never go and read things themselves. One of the biggest things that all laypeople should learn is that the experts are generally lazy. Most experts know the last 20 years of stuff in their fields, if that, because they are also professional skimmers (which they have to be, to meet deadlines).

>Also if I were to reference Gibbon in a discussion with a historian would they look down on it like a wiki reference.
Again a lot depends on context. If you were to cite an argument or interpretation of Gibbon in a footnote in a paper, it would look weird, because that kind of citation is generally for invoking someone else's authority on some point so that you don't have to make the case yourself. For example if you just want to note in passing, in support of your own thesis, that the general scholarly consensus on Horace has shifted from seeing him as a representative of this one trend, to seeing from more as a representative of this other trend, then you can cite a recent paper that makes this point. But if you want to note in passing, for your own thesis, that Marxist interpretations of the ancient economy are completely correct, and you cite Friedrich Engels saying "Marxist interpretations of the ancient economy are completely correct," that would look weird.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 17:57:41 2022 No.19770022

So the question is always how and why you're citing Gibbon. For a nice quote that sets the scene for something you want to say? Fine. As an example of a certain influential interpretative framework in the context of a discussion of different interpretative frameworks, also fine. But as an authority on a modern contentious or "surprising" point of interpretation, not fine, unless the circumstances are fairly strange. For example, maybe Theodor Mommsen's 150 year old assessment of Roman tax law is actually still pretty much correct, or at least still a valid interpretation and still the one you want to prefer, then sure you would cite that as an authority (while probably noting in the footnote something like "Mommsen's interpretation, despite being challenged and qualified, is still essentially that of modern scholars," and maybe pointing to a recent authoritative source for this point).

But if you mean, can you enjoy Gibbon, or think Gibbon was correct in general, in a casual conversation with a scholar who studies the most up to date archaeological literature and knows well that Gibbon was factually wrong about some things and his sources were limited and his views are highly idiosyncratic by today's standards and so forth? Then this goes back to the earlier point about whose respect you want and why. If you're talking to someone who just shouts "Outdated!" when you say you think "Gibbon was actually onto something with his overall idea," he's an idiot, because he's being elitist about "up to date-ness" in a nonsensical context. Would you say "Marx is outdated!" to a Marxist who says "Marx was basically right about the ancient economy," because you're not a Marxist? Even if you think Marx was wrong, or even if you think that Marx was wrong because he didn't have access to more recent data, it's silly to just say he's "outdated," as if being "newer" is inherently better. It's still basically plausible to say "Marx holds up" or "Marx was right in a deeper way, a way that could be modified to fit more modern data."

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 18:04:21 2022 No.19770065 File: 312 KB, 735x492, 1_Tf-AJevE88OJcUFrrzgXbg.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19765670 being a cuckold to big publishing

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 18:34:01 2022 No.19770237 >>19769698 One of my favorite econ historians does this and is quite good at it. He's an "Independent scholar"

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 18:35:03 2022 No.19770242 >>19769799 My decline and fall has 8 volumes and my History of Rome from Mommsen is 8 books in 4 volumes.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 18:40:18 2022 No.19770270

>>19770010
I've been rigorously trained in historiographical methods at 4 universities, due in part to two faculty departures shortly after I began, so I've had 5 historiography courses and spent about 10 years doing research and writing as a grad student before finishing. It's far more than a standard lit review. That would be a handful of books, this was much more detailed and ultimately the project was abandoned and transformed into something completely different.

Yes, many people attack Toynbee and others not because of snobby gate-keeping, but because they're too lazy to read it. They pretend like it's useless, but they can't cite specific examples of why. That's why my critical reviews are always pretty detail/evidence heavy.

I wrote a reader's report on a book that was 10 pages single spaced. I recorded all of the derivative information and the inappropriate portions of the text.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 18:41:30 2022 No.19770281

>>19770014
You've got it all wrong, you write book 1 that earns respect for you being intellectual. Then each book after that you go for a broader audience until you hit book 4-5 which becomes your textbook writing time and popular book time. By then people know you know.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:03:56 2022 No.19770404
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>all the history grads coming in here flexing their degrees (something they don't get to do often) and belittling a 11-volume, 14 thousand page history for being too shallow
Christ Almighty, nobody on /lit/ asking for history book recommendations are planning on being fucking hardcore historians or learning historiography.

Durant is perfectly good for the average /lit/izen who is interested in history and has minimal knowledge (or even moderate knowledge, since Durant makes plenty of references and jokes to eras other than the subjects of his books). And most importantly to the average /lit/ user, Durant's books actually have great prose that focus on the humanities side of history. His writings are genuinely beautiful and insightful; and will provide context for any event, piece of literature, and philosophy in the last 2,000+ years.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:04:10 2022 No.19770407 >>19770014 >liminal queer subjectivities. Has academia fallen so far in the 15 years I've been gone?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:08:11 2022 No.19770424 audiobooks for several books i recommend not starting with oriental heritage or skipping ahead a few chapters, because he starts off so slow and general in it https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRwvoZH2H2hgRDdnuKkt9fQ/playlists

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:27:55 2022 No.19770512

Durant got rich then retired early and got to travel around the world, fuck his qt wife daily and visit museums and libraries all day. On top of all that he's a good writer.
No wonder the history degrees who've spent the last 6 years writing 2000 pages about queerness in 18th century Irish coffeehouses are seething so much about him kek

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:32:01 2022 No.19770539

>>19766715
>purport to be history.
If it's only history when using some grand theory to interprete data, I don't care about it. If history is reporting personal accounts or maybe archeological-like discoveries, then they are doing good work.

>>19766961
>Today I learned I'm not a fan of history but of chronology.
Right? I don't need the bias filled ramblings, thanks.

>>19768512
A black man died of a fentanyl overdose.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:33:39 2022 No.19770546

>>19768512
i saw it live on stream. it was white antifa guys in hoodies suspiciously well organized throwing molotovs through windows and systematically smashing shops with hammers all night.

if you search the site it's very sad. the owner were heartbroken,

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:35:27 2022 No.19770554 >>19770546 Not at all true

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:39:08 2022 No.19770575

>>19770554
which part? there was a guy who came by after the fire who said it was his favorite store as a kid, all the streams that night were white twinky guys smashing every pane of glass they could find with hammers. didnt you see the furniture store etc get torched?

strangely well organized as i said. not random. seemed like they were on a mission. a few streamers talked to them and they were evasive and nervous, not unprofessional and wanting to talk much. also remember the weird car with that one woman, people were trying to determine whether they were feds. the whole night was weird as fuck.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 19:57:21 2022 No.19770671 >>19770546 I would believe this because joggers don't care enough about books to burn it down. I read that in London riots done by the new British, there was a street where every store got looted top to bottom except the bookstore which was untouched.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:01:43 2022 No.19770691 >Will Durant was born in 1885 >Ariel Durant was born in 1898 >They married in 1913 based?

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:03:13 2022 No.19770699

>>19764794
Durant is shit, but the historians offer no alternative. What is a beginner supposed to read to get a big picture understanding of western history and all the must-know facts, events and people? Cambridge is 10 times longer, so it's a wee bit impractical.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:07:37 2022 No.19770719 >>19770691 Based Durant getting khazar cunny

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:12:44 2022 No.19770745
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>>19770691
>She met her future husband when she was a student at Ferrer Modern School in New York City. He was then a teacher at the school, but resigned his post to marry Ariel, who was 15 at the time of the wedding, on October 31, 1913. The wedding took place at New York's City Hall, to which she roller-skated from her family's home in Harlem.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:15:49 2022 No.19770757 >>19765080 >efore I left grad school I was planning on writing a dissertation on the feminist aesthetics of Kate Bush's music videos. I would unironically read this desu

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:20:13 2022 No.19770769 >>19766391 Butt hurt expert getting paid $18 an hour as an adjunct to teach kids paying $66k a year for school detected.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:21:30 2022 No.19770773 >>19770691 He just keeps getting more and more based

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:22:05 2022 No.19770774 File: 26 KB, 249x317, William_and_Ariel_Durant.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19770512 > fuck his qt wife daily hmmm

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:25:08 2022 No.19770787 >>19764794 I started reading this because it seemed like a good collected way to learn world history. I ended up being extremely disappointed with the first 100 pages of Volume I and stopped. Good thing I didn't pay for it!

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:38:03 2022 No.19770844

>>19770769
Not him, but

I got over 50k plus bennies. At one University a state over adjuncts made 28k, I did that the year I finished for teaching experience but only got 3k a course since I was masters. They had a Berkeley dude who was brilliant and sooo depressed at 38k.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:41:44 2022 No.19770862 >>19769557 oh for fucks sake you're the same guy who sperged hard the other day when someone thought your shelf looked unstable

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 20:45:39 2022 No.19770886 >>19770862 You could at least link the thread so the rest of us could potentially have a laugh

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:05:40 2022 No.19770973

>>19770699
>What is a beginner supposed to read to get a big picture understanding of western history and all the must-know facts, events and people?
The "big picture" understanding of history you probably already have from high school is good enough to contextualize most history books. If you really are totally clueless on chronology or geography, you can always pirate a lecture series from the Great Courses or something similar. Whatever version of the generalized "must-know facts" of history you get is going to be reductive and inaccurate, so you might as well get that stage of your education over with as soon as possible. Better yet, have some confidence, dive into a more specific work that interests you, and look up anything that confuses you using the resources you have online.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:18:06 2022 No.19771021 >>19770886 >>/lit/thread/S19718712#p19719809 enjoy

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:19:15 2022 No.19771026 File: 351 KB, 2364x1330, PXL_20220119_002736463.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19770862 It seems that my massive shelf has been the cause of some controversy.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:26:04 2022 No.19771045 >>19771026 Nice Mommsen set. Hated reading Marpingen.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:26:23 2022 No.19771046 File: 56 KB, 462x377, 1555907661706.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19771021 >academic credentialist AND power tool credentialist He's too powerful.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:38:53 2022 No.19771102
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>>19770973
This guy is half right. The problem is the state of high school. My great fortune was to have a history grad student for a history, high school teacher who introduced me to non-history textbook history. We only did primary source history. These days, kids are taught to the test. I've recently observed some high schoolers and was shocked, dismayed, and offended by how bad it is. They read books I read in middle school, in English classes for example, like scarlet letter (7th grade) and to kill a mockingbird (8th grade), and have never been introduced to the canon or classics of Western History.

>>19771046
Chainsaw and wood snob too.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:39:51 2022 No.19771105 >>19771021 What a sperg

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:44:40 2022 No.19771132

>>19770973
>>19771102

To follow up on my half right comment: A big part getting a general picture is taking Western Civ courses. In fact, teaching one yourself will give you an incredible knowledge of the subject. Go to your local bookstore, get 2-5 college textbooks (they're dirt cheap if older than 2-3 years, look at Worlds Together, Longman, and Oxford for decent texts, avoid Jill Lepore's incessant liberalism) and prepare a syllabus for 16 weeks going from Emergence of Civilization (Babylon, China if you're into Global History, Middle East) to 1300-1500 (Renaissance, religious conflicts, Columbian exchange, birth of modern slavery).
You will quickly get a top down view. If you live near a large land grant institution, University of Alabama, Knoxville, LSU, Florida State, Texas in Austin, you can just walk into big lecture rooms and sit down and learn. Old people used to come in all the time and do that in my courses as an undergrad (I went to a HUGE state university with 1000 kid classes)

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:49:12 2022 No.19771148

>>19771132
Last bit: I received a temporary grant appointment through a national trust at a local University to fill in gaps for their needs at intro level courses. They had me teach every intro course outside of my specialties (You choose 1-2 major fields and 2-3 minor fields as a PhD), including both American history surveys.

They hired me over the course of the summer, and then told me 9 days before day 1 of class what I would teach. So I put together 3 separate syllabuses for 4 courses outside of my specialties.

Look at the table of contents, think on them, and look for the big, major events, major trends, major figures.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:52:12 2022 No.19771163 File: 163 KB, 640x360, A235E3E0-EEDA-4B31-A629-607ECE115E8F.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Whatifalthist map of the world in 2100. Will Durant is partially at fault for this.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 21:53:47 2022 No.19771168 >>19771163 What Paradox games do to a mf

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 22:02:13 2022 No.19771211 >>19765614 there is quantity and there is quality had Vollman ever created a single sentence that sticks with you, that changes you? I have hundreds from Nietzsche in my brain now

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 22:04:21 2022 No.19771224 >>19771163 holy kek

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 22:43:18 2022 No.19771421

>>19770010
>Scholarly is a relative term
I just really hate this new thing.
I can't have any opinion at all on the use of a galley unless I'm actually a proven expert on making one, rowing one, captaining one and having led a fleet in battle for a decade each not to mention the decade of studying the history of it.
When did we make having an opinion on something required so much?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:10:00 2022 No.19771564 File: 368 KB, 492x376, IMG_0119.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Read most of the thread and still have no idea what to read.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:11:12 2022 No.19771569 >>19771564 Read whatever the fuck you want.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:35:40 2022 No.19771695 >>19771421 You can have an opinion, but they have autistic people who spend a lifetime arguing about the position people held their spears in the Greek Phalanx. Was it overhand or underhand?

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:36:41 2022 No.19771698 >>19771564 What do you like? Burckhardt is great for all times and places even though he wrote on Constantine and the Renaissance. You might like his insifht into human nature and politics and culture and all that

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:43:03 2022 No.19771730

>biggest coverage is the history of ideas
>Durant was a PhD from an Ivy in philosophy and made it big out the gate with his first philosophy book.
>"Noooo! He doesn't have credentials like I do, the books are shallow."
Absolutely seething. Durant has great prose and there are few broad surveys as good for many of the eras, let alone anyone else doing multiples.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:48:46 2022 No.19771752

>>19770691
>>19770745
The fact that Durant makes academics on 4chan seethe, but that tenured chairs at top schools gave him great reviews already indicated it, but this confirms it, dude was a Chad. Chad always makes the incel seethe when he does their niche.

It's why the analytic spergs hated Hegel so much, they looked back at his bio and saw he partied in beer halls and married an 18 year old at 40, then had five masculine sons.

Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:49:22 2022 No.19771757

>>19771730
>biggest coverage is the history of ideas
>>Durant was a PhD from an Ivy in philosophy and made it big out the gate with his first philosophy book.
So he's trained in philosophy not history. It's an exaggeration to say that the 'biggest coverage' is given to history of ideas. There's far more social & political history.
>>"Noooo! He doesn't have credentials like I do, the books are shallow."
>Absolutely seething. Durant has great prose
They can have great prose and still be shallow.
>and there are few broad surveys as good for many of the eras, let alone anyone else doing multiples.
Not really true they're just not as popular or not as accessible.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:52:12 2022 No.19771777 >>19771730 >Durant has great prose good prose doesn't mean good history

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 18 23:53:50 2022 No.19771787 >>19771752 >but that tenured chairs at top schools gave him great reviews already indicated it, Kind of an exaggeration when there were just as many negative reviews as positive ones.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 00:02:42 2022 No.19771836

>>19771778
/His/ hasn't been kind to my knowledge of this
>He wasn't born in the winter if shepherds were keeping their flocks. Turns out they just timed this and easter to match pagen holidays
>Nobles in the middle ages actually petition the pope to ban crossbow so they won't die sort of an abuse of power for one's own gain
>One pope finds out in a dream that tattoos are ok as needed to add more members same for shellfish
>Divorce no longer a problem once it gets more popular
>Hell never even mentioned in the book only later

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 00:15:21 2022 No.19771897 >>19771752 This is kinda funny, because Schopenhauer used to lecture against Hegel, and Hegel was like, who the fuck is that?

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 00:16:32 2022 No.19771900 >>19771757 Universities do this sort of territorialization/demarcating a bit more now than they did in the past. THe mandarin was a more popular figure then than now, so one was not limited to one field as much.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 00:17:47 2022 No.19771904 >>19771777 'good history' is codeword for 'history that reinforces my political beliefs'. History is nothing more than an ideological tool so you might as well make it sound pretty.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 00:23:54 2022 No.19771921

>>19771757
>>and there are few broad surveys as good for many of the eras, let alone anyone else doing multiples.
>Not really true they're just not as popular or not as accessible.
All I want from this thread is a Durant-sized general history with the same scope. I've asked repeatedly and there's still nothing. Don't give me a 20 000 page multivolume colossus, don't give me works focusing on a single century. Give me someone who did what Durant was going for, but better. May be by different authors of course, but it has to be complete.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 00:47:01 2022 No.19771993 >>19769468 >sad historians You may as well just say historians mate.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 01:06:48 2022 No.19772071 >>19771904 >History is nothing more than an ideological tool Anybody who thinks that should be hanged

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 01:33:19 2022 No.19772125 >>19771921 >give me, give me Shut up. No one is obliged to spoonfeed you, especially since plenty of /his/ anons have already recommended several other books that could replace Durant.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 01:40:12 2022 No.19772144

>>19764794
Imagine wasting 40 years of your life on a fanfiction ("caveman" history is an invention to hide the EMPCOE survivors, who obviously didn't have any modern tech so they lived like cavemen)

Almost all of mainstream history (meaning what you see in your textbooks) is fake or fabricated, same with "science"

The only worthy intellectual endeavors are the ones concerning the mind (philosophy, mathematics, literature, etc.) and God since these don't depend necessarily on history, but only the contents to which you apply and verify yourself

Science could be like this but it would be a very expensive hobby

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 01:43:05 2022 No.19772150 >>19764864 at least a tranny like you was not allowed by the heavens to even write Bible correctly, such is the disgrace of being you have now dialte

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 01:46:11 2022 No.19772164 >>19765423 >Youtubers and wiki are intentionally trying to make people idiots to control the population How so?

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 01:55:58 2022 No.19772182

>>19765567
>since he had his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia, he was an extremely intelligent and well read man
it doesn't, it makes the opposite point you're trying to make since universities don't create philosophers and trying to turn Philosophy into an academic or worse, professional, activity, regulated by government education secretariats, I goes averse to what Philophy is and what a philosopher is meant to do

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 01:56:59 2022 No.19772184 >>19765396 >and even crazy alternate histories like this one Russian history what do you think of it?

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 02:01:35 2022 No.19772192

>>19765602
>Durant doesn't really have a consistent idea of history. He's just spinning and weaving tales. One doesn't have to be rigid, but they should have a disciplined way of thinking in which events are ordered
oriental myths are not like this and they're great (history of the Persian kings for example)

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 02:18:49 2022 No.19772221

>>19769557
do you see any good attempt of documenting the whole covid fiasco? I wouldn't like to see such a good opportunity of embarassement and loss of public respect (if there was even any remaining) for the establishment go to waste

if it helps I've been archiving by date as many news and articles I could find by month and year since the middle of 2021 (my folder has more than 4500 links so far, a lot isn't categorized yet), though /cvg/ in pol has done a good job explaining the lab leak in an organized way
https://justpaste.it./80x6b

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 02:28:57 2022 No.19772249

>>19770699
>What is a beginner supposed to read to get a big picture understanding of western history and all the must-know facts, events and people?
don't know about others but history started to be more interesting and easy to remember when I started documenting my family tree

You have to learn about each region and period your ancestors lived to find the documents, this eventually branches out to the point you will learn a lot about your country and Europe's history through primary evidence if you are not a nigger (in which case you will study Africa a lot more, aassuming you are capable of abstract throught like that)

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 02:36:01 2022 No.19772259

>>19772125
No they didn't. All they did was criticizing Durant, while giving incomparable alternatives. I'm repeating myself, but that's what you have to do when you're replying to a retard. As for my asking for book recommendations with support, that's what this board is for dumbass. I've done that multiple times for others in areas where I'm the expert. The only poster that's entirely useless is the one that fails at reading and spouts pointless garbage. Refrain from dumping any more stink, because this thread is otherwise quite pleasant.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 02:38:03 2022 No.19772267 File: 1017 KB, 1437x2048, licensed-image.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] What do you history people think about Spengler?

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 03:04:20 2022 No.19772317

>>19772267
I'm interested in what they think of the Hindu explanation of the historical process

Some explanations about it by Olavo de Carvalho
>It is impossible, for anyone who has taken the trouble to study a little the Hindu explanation of the historical process, to observe the sequence of power structures that follow one another in the course of Western history without noticing that it repeats ipsis litteris the transition from the Brahmana government to the Kshatryia, from this to the Vishyia, and from this to the Shudra misrule and to the confusion of the pariahs that foreshadows either the end of society or the return to the original order.

>I will here briefly summarize this doctrine, not as it is in its pure original formulation, but in the adaptation I have given it, in courses and lectures given since 1980, to make it more flexible as an explanatory tool for more recent cultural-historical processes.

>The brâhmana are the intellectual caste, bent on the pursuit of spiritual knowledge and the construction of a social order that more or less reflects the "will of God" - the laws that determine the entire structure of reality.

>The kshatryia are the warriors and aristocrats, who superimpose on the structure of reality the glorification of their own dynastic traditions and the expansion of their military power.

>The váishyia are the bourgeois and merchants. They seek in everything profit and economic efficiency, which they illusorily take as effective power, ignoring the military and spiritual bases of society and ending up being quickly destroyed by the shudra. These are the "proletarians" in the Roman sense of the term. Unable to govern themselves, they matter only by the power of numbers, by the quantitative extension of the "offspring".

>The Brahmana fall by their difficulty in remaining faithful to their original spiritual intuition, crumbling entropically into doctrinal confrontations of a suffocating artificialism, ever more insoluble and violent.

>The rise of aristocratic power, with the formation of modern nation-states, arose directly from the need to appease religious conflicts by means of an external, politico-military force.

>The kshatryia government falls because the aristocratic-military establishment is an essentially centralizing and expansionist power, which has to rely on a growing bureaucracy whose employees it cannot itself continue to supply indefinitely, and which it will therefore pick from among the most talented members of the two lower castes, to whom it will give the necessary training for the exercise of its new administrative, judicial, diplomatic, etc. functions.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 03:05:21 2022 No.19772319

>>19772317
>Hence modern "intellectuality" is born, as a by-product of an educational system aimed at training officials for the state. On the other hand, as soon as the bureaucracy is consolidated as a means of social ascension, the candidates to it are always greater in number than the positions available, while education, being itself an instrument of selection, necessarily has to reach a wider circle of students than those to whom it can guarantee a position in the civil service.

>The bureaucracy with which the kshatryia state controls society thus becomes a delayed-effect bomb. On the one hand, needless to say, the bureaucratic intelligentsia soon has effective control of the state in its hands, dreaming of shaking off from its shoulders the yoke of an increasingly idle and costly aristocratic caste. On the other side, there is the crowd of rejects. Their ambitions have been awakened by education, frustrated by professional selection. They form the contingent of what I have called the "virtual bureaucracy" - the growing army of those relatively trained but functionless individuals. Their only possible place in society is within the state, but the state has no place for them.

>They are the revolutionary class par excellence, the central character of the modern adventure. They will soon dream of a State adapted to their needs. While they are unable to create it, they are busy endlessly chattering on all subjects, spreading their resentment and frustrations throughout society and, above all, usurping the prestige of the old brâhmana, of whom they are an inverted caricature. The "intellectuals" are the lay clergy of the Revolution.

>On the other hand, the aristocratic state is costly and cannot be maintained indefinitely with the resources of a traditional and simplistic agrarian economy; economic expansion requires the mobilization of specific capabilities that are those of the váishya. The bankers and industrialists provide the new economic base of the state, harnessing the shudra workforce to proportions never dreamed of before, and replacing the old agrarian economy with modern capitalism.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 03:07:47 2022 No.19772328

>>19772319
>It is at this point - and only in this respect - that the difference between two systems of ownership of the means of production becomes historically determinant, creating a peculiar situation that Karl Marx will deceptively project onto the entire course of history. But it is also clear that the rise of capitalism in itself poses no risk to the aristocratic class, which easily adapts to the new ways of acquiring wealth and integrates into its ranks, through marriages and the distribution of noble titles, the newly ascended rich without ancestral nobility, sine nobilitate (abbreviation s. nob., hence the term "snob").

>To this adaptation corresponds, politically, the passage from the absolute monarchic state to the modern parliamentary monarchy, a process that has no reason to be violent or traumatic, only becoming so in France because the excessive growth of the state bureaucracy had fatally caused an even greater growth of the "virtual bureaucracy" and turned the frustrated ambitions of the intelligentsia into pure revolutionary rancor. It was the latter that made the revolution. There was not a single capitalist among the revolutionary leaders, and the bourgeoisie, as we saw in England, never needed any revolution to raise itself socially to a status to which the aristocracy itself insistently invited it. The concept of "bourgeois revolution" is one of the greatest frauds in the history of social science. The components of the virtual bureaucracy, in turn, cannot be defined economically. Their only common trait was the education that set them apart from the masses. They came from all classes - from the peasantry, the old clergy, the petty bourgeoisie, the impoverished sectors of the aristocracy itself.

>They had no unity of origin, but of social situation and ambitions. The true formula for their unity lay in the future: in the image of the perfect State, invested with all the virtues they thought they themselves embodied. Living on self-glorifying fantasy, psychological compensation for their vexatious social position, it is not surprising that they conceived themselves as heirs of the intellectual authority of the Brahmana but also imagined themselves the natural successors of the Church as the spokesmen and protectors of the poor and oppressed, the shudra. Everywhere they speak in the name of "science" but also of "social justice". They imagine they embody at the same time the highest spiritual authority and the trampled rights of the lowest caste. But just as there were no bourgeois in the vanguard of the "bourgeois revolution," there will be no proletarians among the leaders of the "proletarian revolution."

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 03:08:52 2022 No.19772330

>>19772328
>All revolutionary sociology is an ideological fraud designed to cover up the power of the "intellectuals. These are not a caste at all. They are an interface born accidentally from the cancerous swelling of the bureaucracy, and for this very reason they will fight to make it grow even larger wherever they acquire the means to do so. They are, strictly speaking, pariahs - a confused and delirious mixture of speech fragments from the various castes. They are the pseudo-caste without function or axis, sociopathic by birth and vocation.

>The rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie is not a revolutionary process. It is a long and complex process of incorporation and adaptation. French capitalism was born and remained stunted by the Revolution, which came with bureaucratic expansion and has continued to live on it until today, in a nation that is par excellence the paradise of the "intellectuals". Capitalism developed in England, where the aristocracy adapted smoothly to its new capitalist functions, and in America, where, the blood aristocracy being sparse, the capitalist bourgeoisie invested itself with the heroic-aristocratic ethos, generating a new kshatryia caste. I note, in passing, that this transfiguration of the American bourgeoisie into aristocracy - the most important and vigorous phenomenon in modern history - would never have been possible without the profound Christian impregnation of the new class, which made it, in contrast to the farce of the "intellectuals", the partial and distant but authentic heir to Brahmanical authority.

>In Hindu doctrine, there is never a shudra government. The shudra are, by definition, governed and not rulers. The subject may be born a shudra, but as he rises to positions of importance, he is already an "intellectual" (if Lula remained a lathe operator, he would only be a lathe operator). What there can be is the government of the intellectuals posing as the shudra vanguard and, of course, oppressing the shudra more than ever, so that they create the economic basis for an unlimitedly expansive state bureaucracy.

>Economically, shudra government, or socialism, has only verbal existence. In 1921, Ludwig von Mises gave the full demonstration that a fully statist economy is unviable, and that therefore every self-appointed socialist regime would never be anything but capitalism disguised under the iron shell of state bureaucracy. History has not ceased to prove him right ever since.

There's more in the text (including suggestions on how to live depending which caste you are) but this sums it up

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 03:21:33 2022 No.19772356
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>>19764794
Tabari's History of Prophets and Kings comes close. The english translation is 40 volumes, with 200 pages each barring the notes. About a quarter of it is citing the chain of transmission for each paragraph, but that in itself can be useful.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 07:52:31 2022 No.19773008

>>19771787
I've never seen a review by a professional scholar of the books that comes close to approaching the abject negatively of >>19764852. In part, this is because "he's not an expert," isn't a good argument, nor is it particularly meaningful for the scope of many of the books since no one is an expert in "the entire middle ages" or even "the entire Reformation." That doesn't stop surveys from being useful. Plenty of people who hold graduate degrees in the history of religion could benefit from reading a broad survey like "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years," as evidenced by how often experts get key facts wrong going even slightly outside their niche (plus, anything related to the Masoretic text gets hard bias).

What critics of Durant do often say is not that "surveys are worthless/impossible," or that the require expert input (because Durant had constant expert input) but:

A. He over stresses the importance of key figures vs larger tends. You see this more in more recent criticisms. Compare Durant's surveys covering around 100 years to a more recent one, like Evan's Pursuit of Power (covering Europe from Napoleon's defeat to the eve of WWI): you'll see Evan's using far more statistics as well as statistics on archives and general trends in documents, as well as more primary sources tied to everyday people. To be fair though, a lot more of these exist for the 19th century. When Durant reviews important trends in an era, it's generally trends in the writings of exceptional individuals. The plus side for Durant is that he spends way more time on literature and philosophy then is the norm today. Making room for one tends to reduce space for the other. That Durant has a tendency to write in or quote superlatives also adds to the "great man" critique, although this is somewhat unfair given he issues caveats to this fairly often.

2. He doesn't spend much time at all on controversy in history. It's not so much the individual controversies involved here, since those shift constantly over time (for instance, ink spilt over the Council of Jamnia then would be wasted now), as how it informa people of how history works. Of course, at a time when a history professor can win plaudits for claiming "race, class, and gender" represent a "holy trinity" of historical analysis, I'm not sure if swinging to the methods of the day is necissarily a good thing. They're certainly important and certainly not the only units of analysis that matter.

3. He overstresses repetition and pattern in history and doesn't get into contingency enough. This isn't to say he doesn't frequently get into contingencies and counterfactuals, he does all the time, but he cuts them short. To be fair, the books would easily be 18,000 pages with in depth analysis of contingencies at all the key points. However, Durant is a far cry from being the worst at this. Historians' attempts to break into pol sci are far worse. Why Nations Fail is a masterwork of selecting on the

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 07:56:36 2022 No.19773019

>>19773008
Dependant variable. And certainly he's a far cry from actual pol sci on looking at historical trends. There is a focus on trend and repetition but it's nothing on par with Fukuyama's opus. Which isn't to say those books are bad either (Why Nations Fail is particularly weak though, despite being written by an "expert" in history).

And then of course there is just the Ivy Tower gatekeeping you'd normally expect, which tells people to read a series of disjointed papers on "the economics of cities world wide from 500BC-1500AD" next to one on "gender in Southeast Asia from 600-1200AD" bound into a Cambridge or Blackwater guide in the same breath as accusing surveys of being so broad as to be useless.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 08:00:31 2022 No.19773038

>>19773008
On the whole 'experts' thing, compilation books that are written by groups are all, universally, worse as books. That's not to say they can't be useful to have as a reference, but you reference the different parts of the work separately when you need, for example, a quick primer on the Song dynasty or the early Caliphate or whatever. To sit and read in one go, as a coherent work, give me a synthesising amateur any day of the week.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 08:03:15 2022 No.19773052 >>19772330 >>In Hindu doctrine, there is never a shudra government. Historically there have been, and not as exceptions either.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 08:27:04 2022 No.19773130

>>19773038
Right, the substitute for Durant with something more expert would be an undergrad textbook, not what people are recommending. The problem is that Western Civ is normally two semesters tops, sometimes one, so things will be more, not less broad.

It's a weird trend. You have the opposite in philosophy, where people will say "primary sources only, chronological order," or if you get a survey, it's chronological. Where really philosophy lends itself more to surveys in a specific area (e.g. philosophy of mind, ontology, etc.) where you see developments and different solutions compared and in dialogue with each other, and where modern science can be brought in to the degree that empircle evidence informs the debate.

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 08:29:41 2022 No.19773143
File: 3.71 MB, 1932x2052, file.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Does anyone know about this? I bought it at a book sale for like 2 bucks because it picks up right where Durant leaves off but it seems like the only results on google for this book are library entries.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 08:30:58 2022 No.19773147 File: 2.67 MB, 1352x1436, file.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19773143 forgot half my image sorry

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 08:42:41 2022 No.19773186 >>19773143 No, but I have read the Pursuit of Power and that is a very good continuation. Author is better know for his Third Reich Trilogy.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 08:48:29 2022 No.19773214 >>19764794 >covers thousands of years in the first 6 books >the next 6 cover barely 200 years But why

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 08:54:59 2022 No.19773232 >>19773214 Read Human Accomplishment

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 09:58:55 2022 No.19773401 Prose = Reddit

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 09:59:14 2022 No.19773402

>>19772164
They control and rewrite history and your interest. I can search for "The frogs, Dykes are we" and it will pull up half a dozen videos first. They try to conceal information.

Similar to that, a Jewish historian lied about the Nazis and capitalism bfor his dissertation, he was caught, and two historians drove him out of history. One was a Jew who was offended because the suggested his parents died at Auschwitz. It wasn't true. Now you mostly find sympathetic accounts in which people say he was attacked
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/node/1730

Wiki just erased it. It shows just how bad the Marxist influence is. He was such a lying Marxist, he became a lawyer, the bar refused him for being a known liar, so he became a professor in Florida.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 10:00:20 2022 No.19773405 >>19772182 Look, Columbia produces shit phds, and the bar was really low in the pre WWII period, I've read old dissertations that are less than 100 pages

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 10:02:08 2022 No.19773411 >>19772221 It's useless, Google erases information, and they go after the way back machine, archive.org, and erase their news servers Wikipedia is run by autistic liberals and the mentally ill, so they control what exists

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 10:04:03 2022 No.19773418

>>19772267
I like him, but don't tell anyone, bc they're fucking robots and will call you a right-winger.

I was reading evola as part of a research project with a friend, some first year grad student called it "alt right", then my friend published his book and gave a lecture on it!

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 10:06:36 2022 No.19773427 >>19773143 >>19773147 I have it and it's fascinating to see as a product of the concerns of the middle twentieth

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 10:11:52 2022 No.19773448 >>19772267 Retard and literally a proto-chudcel. Math teacher who was so disabled he couldn't even fight in the Great War so satisfied himself with pretending he was gonna be some power behind the throne priest-historian in the near future.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 11:32:16 2022 No.19773816 >>19773448 >Math teacher that alone makes him more based than any other shitstorian

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 11:41:36 2022 No.19773859 >>19773816 t. STEMoid poojeet

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 11:49:40 2022 No.19773900 >>19773859 t. history degree who has to write about the literary perception of gay children in 19th century Britain and comes here to make fun of your superiors(STEMchads)

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 12:18:24 2022 No.19774054 >>19773900 Are you even employed stemnigger

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 12:25:22 2022 No.19774080 >>19772317 >>19772319 >>19772328 >>19772330 Thank you. Would you have the original? I read Portuguese, so I would be quite interested.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 13:18:44 2022 No.19774300 >>19764794 yea plenty Toynbee did one Carl Grimberg too others too I'm sure

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 13:25:30 2022 No.19774333 >>19765764 can you fuck off you stupid whore

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 13:29:17 2022 No.19774350 >>19774300 >Carl Grimberg too And, like Durant, died before he finished. Take note anons. If you're planning a 14-volume opus, start young or write fast.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 13:30:34 2022 No.19774354 File: 84 KB, 307x164, file.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19774350 Bought the whole thing for like 10 buck at a used books bookshop, came in a pack of Jumbo Mr. Freeze pic related

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 13:56:39 2022 No.19774467 >>19774080 here it is fren https://olavodecarvalho.org/sociopatia-e-revolucao/

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 14:03:52 2022 No.19774500 >>19773052 >Historically there have been, and not as exceptions either. shruda as defined by Hindu doctrine? (people who can't govern others or even themselves, hence why they're called proletariat, only capable of breeding)

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 14:07:07 2022 No.19774517

>>19773402
>They control and rewrite history and your interest. I can search for "The frogs, Dykes are we" and it will pull up half a dozen videos first.
isn't that just jewgle being jewgle?

>They try to conceal information.
what information is being hidden about "The frogs, Dykes are we"?

Anonymous Wed Jan 19 14:08:59 2022 No.19774528

>>19773411
>It's useless, Google erases information, and they go after the way back machine, archive.org, and erase their news servers
hence why archive everything at archive.md and use duckduckgo, startpage, searx and brave search

but for the purposes of archiving the mainstream narrative google is ideal

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 14:13:14 2022 No.19774552 >>19766888 Anachronism, applying modern knowledge to works it didn’t exist in, its EXTREMELY common mistake retards make With equal presence among the retards is superficiality I’m retarded a lot of the time

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 14:13:59 2022 No.19774560 >>19774350 Too bad I can't actually study history or get a degree in one cause muh jobs I'd love to work on a long volume series like this

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 14:16:10 2022 No.19774572 >>19773900 I have no degree and work for rail road, you’re not my superior because I would pick you by your neck and do whatever the hell I wanted to you

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 19 14:39:40 2022 No.19774670 File: 103 KB, 671x1024, IMG_20210621_191344_031.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>19774467 Thanks.

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/lit/ - Literature