Have any recommendations on books? (other than Gibbon, of course...) I just finished a whole bunch of books about WW1 and I'm looking for a new era... ;-)
Jim Baird --------------
Sure. They all have the same title:
A History of Ancient Egypt, Grimal N, Blackwell, 1995, 518pp
A History of Greece, Bury JB, MacMillan, 1963, 925pp
A History of Rome, Cary, M, MacMillian, 1960, 820pp
A Shorter Cambridge Medieval History, Previte-Orton, CW, Cambridge, 1952, 2vol, 1202pp
The last one will be hard to find, but there must be a newer version somewhere. You have to fill these out with some reading in whatever your interests are in philosphy, literature, art, sciences and technologies, since these are almost entirely political and social histories. What I liked about them was they were all chronological. This might sound odd, but a fair number of histories are not written chronologically, but jump around. IMO that is a very bad style for historarians to adopt and a lot of more recent works use it to develop their take on events. It also helps a lot to have a couple of references since all the above are weak on maps and commonly assumed background information, like who the hell was Jupiter or Paul. The two I've used are:
A Dictionary of Ancient History, Speake G, ed., Blackwell, 1994, 758pp
Harper's Bible Dictionary, Achtemerier P, ed, Harpers, 1985, 1172pp
What really makes this stuff zing for me is picking a short period, roughtly a century or lifetime together with the politics, social scene, economics, arts, sciences and technologies, and making up an imaginary tableaux. For that you also need to look at these or others like them:
A History of Greek Philosophy, Guthrie, WKC, Cambridge, 1967 2vols, 538p, 553p
A Social History of Art, Hauser A, Knopf, 1952, 2vols, 1022pp
Source Books in the History of the Sciences, Cohen M, Drabkin, IE, McGraw-Hill, 1948, 579pp
I was also interested in WWI and got tremendous help by reading works by Mann, Gide, and Russell as three intellectual giants of the period and thinking about their relative positions of class, national history, and sensibility as they responded to the events they lived. They were all rich or well off, and at a safe distance from the direct assault on the working classes who died off by the millions in the trenches.
A particularly interesting history that leads into WWI and gives a complete political and diplomatic foundation is:
The Struggle for the Mastery of Europe 1848-1918, Taylor, AJP, Oxford, 1957, 638pp
Chuck Grimes