Howard Zinn - People's History of the US Dee Brown - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Wallace Stegner - Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (bio) Studs Terkel - The Good War Edward Countryman - The American Revolution more later when I get home to refresh my memory on some authors.
A qucik spin through the best I've read, in English. 900 Days - Harrison Salisbury Lenin's Tomb & Resurrection - David Remnick Rasputin File, Stalin & The Last Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky Lenin - Robert Service The Red Orchestra - Gilles Perrault East of the Sun - Benson Bobrick Body of Secrets - James Bamford Anything by Barbara Tuchman, but especially The First Salute & A Distant Mirror
Zenit - I just finished Peter the Great, by Robert Massie. Always wondered how a Russian would find this book, since it was written by a yank. I loved it...all 880 pages! Others: John Keegan - The Face of Battle Norman Davies - Europe, A History Richard Rhodes - Making of the Atomic Bomb all of them must reads..if you've got the time!
You've got to go with Will Durant. Heroes of History History of Philosophy Greates Minds and Ideas of All Times.
I've decided I will only post one at a time. So to start--The Making of the English Working Class, EP Thompson
Leftist claptrap. Required reading, in that it is so influential, but in the end, anti-capitalist, hate-America claptrap. Whenever someone holds up Zinn as an icon, I always go to the 11th grade essay written by Pamela Weintraub, and published a review on Amazon. If this 11th grader can skewer Zinn, what does that tell you? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/cu...te&n=283155&s=books&customer-reviews.start=41
Hey man..did I say he was an icon? hell no. I said it was a good book, for what its trying to do. Of course its leftist. But it ain't claptrap if you read it with open eyes. The guy is telling stories about people who don't get their stories told..women in factories in Lynn MA working 75 hour weeks and being fired when they're an hour late...hardscrabble farmers losing everything to the banks...black tenant farmers losing ground at the end of the 19th century...vicious union busting in Flint MI. Its not pretty. Yeah, Zinn tries too hard to paint a leftist portrait of capitalism. But along the way he did open my eyes to some painful stories that are worth hearing.
What about Story of Civilization? Just looking at Amazon...it looks amazing. I'd never heard of the guy thanks! repped
He is really really smart, and really really ideology-free. If you're into audio-books, Durant's audio-books are extremely well narrated.
Howard Zinn's is a fascinating book, and certainly extremely informative. It MUST be required reading, because Zinn is right -- the side of the oppressed is not represented in traditional histories. He says outright in the introduction, that the book is biased, and he intentionally takes the point of view of minority groups because it is a point of view that is not heard enough. It's pretty dumb to use Zinn's book as your sole source of information about US history, but I think that it certainly does provide a very well formulated "second opinion". There's no need to hide from the ugly parts of history.
Joseph Rykwert - The Seduction of Place. This was in that same vein, and as a non-specialist, I really got a lot out of it. I'll have to get my hands on the two you mention, cautious as I am about Mumford. (I know he's tremendously influential and all, I'm just more touched by Jane Jacobs.)
A Different Mirror: A Multicultural History of America - Ronald Takaki Where Zinn focused on class struggle, Takaki focuses on ethnicity. He's probably the father of Ethnic Studies, and this is a classic. John Adams - David McCullough Compelling and informative, particularly in how his relationship with Jefferson emerges. The Great War and Modern Memory - Paul Fussell Mandatory reading for anyone interested in how the 20th century turned into the age of irony. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam - Fatima Mernissi Much more engaging (and grounded in brilliant historical analysis) than the title lets on. Mernissi convincingly calls into questions some basic hadiths used to justify much of Islam's current misogyny.
Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought by Uday Singh Mehta Learn to love, or at least respect, Burke. Recommended to Dr. Wankler a few months ago, recommended to you all now, though it is a bit academic.
Very cool...I'll look into these. I have been interested in the counter-hypothesis too, the effect of the natural environment on cultures, especially the America West. Marc Reisner's book Cadillac Desert, while biased, is a great example of that type of comparison.
My favourite book of all time. He is one of the best WW2 writers out there. Not as good as Stalingrad but still an excellent book This has several stories about life under the Stasi Secret Police in East Germany. They are told by the people that experianced it and some of them are unbelieveable. Some of the best parts of the book are about the author trying to track down ex-stasi members.
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History by John Lewis Gaddis some triumphalism, but still a good book
And I will also second The Making of the English Working Class, and add E.P. Thompson's companion volume, Customs in Common (While not directly history, Thompson's attack on French post-structuralist marxist Louis Althusser in The Poverty of Theory is also excellent. Paul Fussell's Great War and Modern Memory is, as Dr. Jones said, excellent. His later work on WWII, Wartime isn't quite as good, but it's worth reading. Also in the military history vein, John Keegan's The Face of Battle: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme is a compelling look at military history from the perspective of the soldiers fighting the battles, not the commanders executing the war.
Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Should be required reading before anyone can opine on the intent of the founders. This book is a great example of the adage "The past is a foreign country, people are different there." It's also a great summation of a generation of scholarship dedicated to the idea that the United States is not only a product of classical liberalism but also of classical republicanism, and that the latter was far more influential on the thinking of the Revolutionary generation.