Recommend and discuss. I'll start. William Cronon's _Nature's Metropolis_ is the most interesting environmental history I've read. The book is an examination of the relationship between Chicago and its hinterlands. It uses three commodities, grain, meat, and lumber, to show how the new markets of Chicago were created by and promoted the transformation of the landscape of what Cronon calls 'The Great West,' basically the upper Midwest and Great Plains. While this sounds boring in the abstract, in practice its fascinating as Cronon ties in the rise of modern commodity markets, the advent of time zones, refridgeration, and a slew of other technological innovations that allowed the commodity capitalism of the 19th century to function and that created vast environmental transformations. A great read if you're interested in environmental history, Chicago, the 19th century, or modern capitalism.
The March Of Folly by Barbera Tuchman is a great account of several famous historical screw-ups. From the Renaissance popes to the American Revolution and America's involvment in Vietnam. For an historian, Tuchman can actually write very well and tells these stories in a way that keeps you interested. A great read.
Vimy by Pierre Berton - Obviously from the Canadian perspective of the battle of Vimy (WWI). "One chill Easter dawn in 1917, a blizzard blowing in their faces, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps in France went over the to of a muddy scarp known as Vimy Ridge. Within hours, they held in their grasp what had eluded both British and French armies in over two years of fighting: they had seized the best-defended German bastion on the Western Front." - If you are into WWI history, I am sure you will find this book interesting. Pierre Berton is one of the greatest historians in Canada.
Has anyone read Lizabeth Cohen's new book, A Consumer Republic? I should but don't want to plunk down $35.
Two books that were enourmously influential on my notions of history are: Extraordinairy Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay, which describes Tulip Mania, witch hysteria, various financial bubbles and other examples of mass hallucinations. It allowed me to completely avoid the recent stock market collapse. In general, I have found that it's two central assumptions (that the herd instinct is a powerful force in human behavior, and that the herd instinct is frequently wrong) to be very helpful in making just a little sense of this crazy old world. Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill. As my wife has commented, there's some maddenly poor anthropology in here, but there's plenty else that isn't poor. It's basically a history of major deadly infectious diseasesk, and apparently was the first volume to link historical data from China with what was happening in Europe in the same eras. The big thing I learned was the difference between a disease that mostly kills the young and old and one that kills otherwise healthy adults. The first is a tragedy; second is a major socio-economic crisis.
I'm reading Orthodox Worship: A Living Continuity With the Temple, the Synagogue by Benjamin Williams and Harold Anstall, which is about the historical development of the Eastern Orthodox liturgy. Fascinating stuff.
Currently reading some of The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. One of the keystone collections in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), it helped establish the concept that technology is "co-produced" by its developers and its users. Dug it out because I went to see one of the contributors, Michel Callon, give a seminar yesterday on the way in which technology and interest can interact to produce new social/cultural group identities, which in turn influence the development of technology. (Unfortunately, the seminar wasn't very good.)
"The Great War and Modern Memory" by Paul Fussel is fantastic. There's also a fairly new and huge history of India called simply "India: A History" by John Keay that I have been dabbling in lately. Very good read, and it's as much about the historiography of Indian as it is a history book itself. And finally, "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn deserves all the praise it has even gotten, and then some.
I did go and read Cohen's A Consumer's Republic at Borders yesterday (well the intro and first two chapters). It's a very engaging cultural history of consumption in postwar America. She traces how American identities of citizen and consumer have interacted from the New Deal to the present. The chapter on the New Deal examined two competing understandings, that she calls "citizen consumer" and "purchaser citizen." The first was the belief that consumers needed to be organized into political interest groups that could function as a counterweight to industrial power. Thus, the early New Deal saw consumer representatives brought into the NRA boards that governed specific industries and consumers organizing on their own to press for social changes. (One of her main examples is Black consumers organizing to boycott department stores that refused to hire Black employees). Purchaser consumer was a competing ideal that saw boosting consumer spending, and the ability of many consumers to spend, as the key to longterm economic growth. The belief was shared, by the end of the 30s, by business and many in government and resulted in the later New Deal legislation that focused on boosting the ability of citizens to spend (social security, Nat'l Labor Relations Act) as the mechanism to promote growth. Seems like she'll argue that the citizen consumer idea dominated wartime but that purchaser consumer won out in the long run with suburbanization being her evidence. The book goes up to Clinton and I'm looking forward to reading more, especially her accounts of environmentalism and anti-consumerism stuff in the 60s-80s.
I don't read a lot of history, but here are a few books that I could actually imagine at least re-skimming if not re-reading. E.P. Thompson: "The Making of The English Working Class" is one of my favorites, along with the companion volume, "Customs in Common." Alan Trachtenberg: "The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age." More biography, but of historical interest (even though his methodology is questionable at best): Suetonius: "The Twelve Caesars." The chunks of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" that I've read are pretty decent, too, but I can't claim to have really read the whole thing.
WHAT were you doing sitting in borders in Ann Arbor yesterday afternoon you could have been watching Salman Rushdie speak? Actually, maybe you skipped the 4:00 panel (I wish I had) and in fact did go see Rushdie that evening. Btw, I stopped by that Borders yesterday as well and picked up Edward Said's memoir, "Out of Place."
Ah, lucky for you... 10 people on a 1 hour panel, with half of them Shakespearian actors and the other half Rushdie scholars. Totally disjointed and fruitless.
Ten people! That must have been fun to moderate, trying to keep actors and academics to six minute time limits.
I read this for a HIstory of Chicago class. As you mention, it is a great read if you are interested in environmental history, Chicago (I would have written the economic development of Chicago), etc. The level of detail is absolutely staggering. If you're interested in Chicago, I'd also recommend "City of the Century", by Donald Miller. It touches on what Cronon writes about, with nowhere near the detail. But it also traces on other factors---the section on the develop of the institutions such as the museums, the symphony, and other cultural institutions is what stood out for me.
Personally, my favorite history subject is WWII POW escapes. From that genre, I'd recommend "The Wooden Horse" by Eric Williams. The story of the Wooden Horse is pretty well documented; what stood out about this book was the story of what they did once they got out of camp.
I think I may have read that years ago. Does it have pen & ink illustrations, especially of life in the POW camp?
I'm currently reading the Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, which won last year's history Pulitzer. It's an intellectual history of pragmatism as it took form in a post-Civil War discussion group (the metaphysical club) that included oliver wendell holmes and william james among others, and then was carried on by John Dewey. It's really wonderfully written, one of the best intellectual histories I've read for a popular audience. Menand has a very nice way of integrating biography (some of it quite funny) and intellectual lives, and makes a compelling case that biography matters for the development of thought (something that not all intel. historians buy). It's one of those books that's much more interesting and entertaining than it seems like it should be. Oliver Wendell Holmes had a hell of a civil war. Shot through the chest (in his first battle), neck (Antietam), and foot in three separate battles.