I took a look at History Today and the Oxford journal, as well as Sean's Russian pages. The latter had an interesting discussion of Odessa as a Russian-Jewish city of crime, humor, music, stories, trade, and a high mix of peoples from all over the place. It was also compared to other wild and wooly places like NYC, Shanghai, and San Francisco in comparable periods.
Thinking back I took a lot of history that covered everything from the ancient western world to the present in several different branches of history: art history, social history, political history, architectural history, and history of philosophy, mathematics, with pieces of physics, chemistry, and technology. From about the fifth grade all the way through a BA, I had World (western) History, US History, and California History classes that repeated the same sequence in greater and greater detail with evermore controversial inclusions. After I left school African American history came to the fore with Chicano or Latino histories and Japanese and Chinese immigrant histories layered over the Anglo...
Carrol mentioned books. I don't know Alex's sensibility. At a guess his interest in history probably comes from Brad. You learned history through English Lit or Comp Lit and I learned it through Art History and modern fiction.
I was having this discussion with Dennis just yesterday as we mused on Joyce from the Dubliners to Finnigan's Wake where he moves from naturalism into a chronical in the day of Leopold Bloom, to the mythological and legendary, core of the sounds of language and the mental state of a collective consciousness.
If you can get Alex to read Tolstoy's War and Peace, Sebastopol Stories, and Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketchbooks you can rest assured as a mother, you have done well...
CG