Any ideas/recommendations for a good history book covering World History C18-C19-C20th....it needs to be readable rather than dense....thankyou.
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bong ching -
....just bumping this back up the board again....bong ching -
I know John Roberts' Short History of the World which is good, though if you wanted a non-European perspective you might want to go elsewhere (not sure where). Don't know of one only covering the last 3 centuries.
Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes about what he calls 'the short twentieth century' is very good.Comment
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I'm glad you mentioned Hobsbawm, aeolium as he seems to be a good starting point.Originally posted by aeolium View Post
It is a very particular take on history of course but none the worse for that
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I'm afraid my recommendation only just creeps into your time period, 8thobs. But a brilliant and very readable book is Christopher Hill's The Century of Revolution 1603 - 1714. It certainly passes the 'readable' test in spades, and it lays out much that needs to be understood for examining the history of succeeding centuries. Warning: Christopher Hill is a bit of a lefty!Comment
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for the Hobsbawm - BUT HURRY!
and/or EP Thompson:
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I'm just bumping this up the list one last time....
....when a friend asked me for this rec' I didn't think much of it....but now reallise what an enormous book it would have to be, and that to attain the standards expected in contemporary History writing the cross referencing of issues, social, Imperial , nationalistic, political and scientific etc....the only way it could be 'readable' would be to give it a story book quality. So I now see the folly of my question....bong chingComment
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I have a paperback volume "Europe of the Dictators 1919-1945" by Elizabeth Wiskemann: it is one of a series (not all yet written at the time my volume was published) called "Fontana History of Europe" covering the whole period from the fourteen hundreds to the present. My volume was first published 1966, so its probably long out of print, but worth inquiring.
For the period up to and including World War Two, William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" is essential reading, but be warned, it is mighty powerful and disturbing stuff. Ch. 27 "The New Order" could make you feel very ill.
History is a very big subject, the easiest way to answer the question might be to go into the nearest Waterstones and see what's on the shelves.Comment
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Apart from the concise 'synthesis' histories of the world, one option might be to select different continents and read history books about those. There are quite a few on modern European history over the last few centuries (and obviously touching on the wider world) such as the Oxford History of Modern Europe. Perhaps a work on the civilization of China, such as The Genius of China by Robert Temple. Long ago I had wanted to read Joseph Needham's multi-volume Science and Civilization in China, until I realised it would take most of my life to read (as it did his to write) and cost a small fortune.Comment
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I remember seeing those massive volumes of Needham's in the bookshops when I was an undergraduate in Cambridge back in the late sixties. It really was a case of a project that took over a man's life: he set out to write one volume, and ended up with an endless series that if he was still alive he'd still be writing. The more he wrote the more he needed to research, and the more he researched, the more he decided needed writing.
I think aeolium has a good point (#10): essentially, history is too big a subject to cover in any one study, you need to narrow down just which bit of history is of interest and concentrate on that. I hope history teaching has improved since my school days. Every year we would start the autumn term with Julius Caesar and end the summer term somewhere in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Next autumn we'd start again with Julius b****y Caesar again in a bit more depth. We never actually got to modern history, which to me was potentially the interesting bit. Time was when I could bore the pants off you with the Wars of the Roses, but WW1 and WW2, which interested me and did seem a bit more relevant to today, I had to research those myself.Comment
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Yes, it's curious how historical studies are subject to the whims of fashion. When I was studying it in the 1970s the English Civil War was all the rage, with great ideological wars fought out between the book covers between such as the Marxist Christopher Hill and the conservative Trevor-Roper. Recently the (to me dreary) Tudors have dominated. At least now there is a much wider scope for historical study as well as all kinds of genres such as the study of intellectual history, history of science etc (unless Gove has his way and turns the clock back
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