Historical Book Recomendation Thread

Wiki doesn't help, but Google also leads me to an Oxford Short History of Europe for the century, and it's by a guy I know. It'll probably fit the bill. Thanks.

(But you should take it as a compliment that I think of you all even before I think of Google (cuz one wants the endorsement of a reader one trusts))

Edit: Ack, no! I read the description more closely. It's one of those collections of "essays by leading scholars." Those I find even more disjointed than the collected occasional references in Elton and Guy.
 
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Gori the Grey said:
Can somebody recommend a good history of sixteenth-century Europe?

Here's why I need it and therefore what specifically I need. I'm reading, side by side, two histories of Tudor England (Guy and Elton). Naturally, they have to make frequent references to what is occurring on the continent, as they convey Hen or Liz's calculations regarding particular alliances, military ventures, etc. But in Guy and Elton, these matters come in piecemeal (naturally). But as a result, I get a really sketchy sense of the other monarchs' situation and motivations.

So what I'd need is something that identified the major "players": Empire, Spain, France, papacy, Dutch. (And even minor players when needed), and then, through a certain stretch of time kind of treated the internal developments and international ambitions of each one of those, viewed in its own right. I don't need it to be au courant with social history, etc. It can be old-school political, economic, (religious, in this case, of course) history. Just so I get some starting continuous narrative for each of these other players.

Does a thing like that exist?
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I dunno the answer to your question directly but Bret Devereaux's blog (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Acoup) is a great source of historical book recommendations. He's trained as a military historian specializing in classics, so his recommendations tend to be military-focused but I'd poke around on the blog and see if there's anything that looks useful to you.
 
Gori the Grey said:
Can somebody recommend a good history of sixteenth-century Europe?

Here's why I need it and therefore what specifically I need. I'm reading, side by side, two histories of Tudor England (Guy and Elton). Naturally, they have to make frequent references to what is occurring on the continent, as they convey Hen or Liz's calculations regarding particular alliances, military ventures, etc. But in Guy and Elton, these matters come in piecemeal (naturally). But as a result, I get a really sketchy sense of the other monarchs' situation and motivations.

So what I'd need is something that identified the major "players": Empire, Spain, France, papacy, Dutch. (And even minor players when needed), and then, through a certain stretch of time kind of treated the internal developments and international ambitions of each one of those, viewed in its own right. I don't need it to be au courant with social history, etc. It can be old-school political, economic, (religious, in this case, of course) history. Just so I get some starting continuous narrative for each of these other players.

Does a thing like that exist?
Click to expand...
I would be hard pressed to recommend a better history of 16th century Europe than Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II: Vols 1 and 2.

Volume 1 focuses more on trade and society, with Volume 2 focusing more on politics, but both are absolutely outstanding in terms of the scope, details, and context. The books are getting a bit old but are still landmarks. (Braudel originally drafted it while in a German POW camp in WW2, but were revised after the war and published in the 60s.)

I think it was re-issued in the 90s in an abridged version, possibly in 3 smaller volumes. I don't have the abridged versions but internet reviews suggests the abridged versions are quite good. The removed content is apparently mainly footnotes/citations and some parts where Braudel gets lost in his own statistics.
 
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Thank you.
 
Gori the Grey said:
Can somebody recommend a good history of sixteenth-century Europe?

Here's why I need it and therefore what specifically I need. I'm reading, side by side, two histories of Tudor England (Guy and Elton). Naturally, they have to make frequent references to what is occurring on the continent, as they convey Hen or Liz's calculations regarding particular alliances, military ventures, etc. But in Guy and Elton, these matters come in piecemeal (naturally). But as a result, I get a really sketchy sense of the other monarchs' situation and motivations.

So what I'd need is something that identified the major "players": Empire, Spain, France, papacy, Dutch. (And even minor players when needed), and then, through a certain stretch of time kind of treated the internal developments and international ambitions of each one of those, viewed in its own right. I don't need it to be au courant with social history, etc. It can be old-school political, economic, (religious, in this case, of course) history. Just so I get some starting continuous narrative for each of these other players.

Does a thing like that exist?
Click to expand...
Christendom Destroyed by Mark Greengrass covers most of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century (1517-1648 per the cover), but apart from that it sounds very similar to what you want.

The Verge by Patrick Wyman similarly doesn't cover the full century and has one foot in another century (1490-1530) but goes into a lot of detail about the sorts of changes and forces at play in Europe that would shape the rest of the sixteenth century.
 
Traitorfish said:
Christendom Destroyed by Mark Greengrass covers most of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century (1517-1648 per the cover), but apart from that it sounds very similar to what you want.

The Verge by Patrick Wyman similarly doesn't cover the full century and has one foot in another century (1490-1530) but goes into a lot of detail about the sorts of changes and forces at play in Europe that would shape the rest of the sixteenth century.
Click to expand...
And thank you.

Ajidica said:
Volume 1 focuses more on trade and society, with Volume 2 focusing more on politics, but both are absolutely outstanding in terms of the scope, details, and context.
Click to expand...

I've picked it up. (The Verge is on order, TF). It's glorious. Even before "trade and society," volume one has 150 pages on physical geography! 150 pages! I have no idea whether the narrative will be what I need, once I get to it. So I'll get back to you in a month or two. But this is going to be fun in its own right.
 
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Bonyduck Campersang said:
What good books would you recommend on Ancient Mesopotamian history?
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Ancient Mesopotamian history begins with Sumer ~3200 BCE and probably ends as the Romans pick up the remnants of of Alexander's empire maybe around 50 BCE? That is 3000+ years of history. Which part(s) of those 3000 years are you interested in?
 
Birdjaguar said:
Ancient Mesopotamian history begins with Sumer ~3200 BCE and probably ends as the Romans pick up the remnants of of Alexander's empire maybe around 50 BCE? That is 3000+ years of history. Which part(s) of those 3000 years are you interested in?
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Well, any part, but the history of Sumer if I I have to pick one
 
Bonyduck Campersang said:
Well, any part, but the history of Sumer if I I have to pick one
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This is not a new book but it might give you a substantial base to understand the Sumerians. It is a pdf you can read for free.


This book is more recent, 2021, but looks like more of an overview.

press.uchicago.edu

The Sumerians

The Sumerians are widely believed to have created the world’s earliest civilization on the fertile floodplains of southern Iraq from about 3500 to 2000 BCE. They have been credited with the invention of nothing less than cities, writing, and the wheel, and therefore hold an ancient mirror to our...
press.uchicago.edu press.uchicago.edu
 
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As some of the OT-folks know if they're following my posts there, I'm working on several stories now. One of them involves the Glencoe Massacre of February 13, 1692.

Can anyone recommend some good reference books for this? Preferably with an adequate number of maps? I need to know the background of this event - what caused it, why it mattered, what the consequences were for both the victims (those who survived) and the perpetrators, and so on.

I've read some basic information on Wikipedia, but of course that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. There are books on Amazon and eBay, but I don't have enough familiarity with this historical time and setting to know which books are reliable and which aren't. I'm looking for factual information, not historical fiction (I'll be writing the historical fiction within a story that's a crossover between the Merlin TV series and the Highlander TV series. I know the TV shows played fast and loose with historical accuracy, but that doesn't mean I have to.

Any recommendations or suggestions will be appreciated. :yup:
 
Thanks. Some are unavailable, others prohibitively expensive. There is one book I found on both Amazon and eBay that come with high ratings and good reviews, and it was used for this article. That one may do, along with an article. I'm venturing into unknown territory here, since I've never studied this period of history.

It was somewhat bemusing to look this up on eBay, since most of the offerings were for post cards.
 
To my eyes, the Paul Hopkins book looks best. $40 on Kindle, if you have kindle. Can your local library order books through an interlibrary loan program? For Stuart history generally (background to your background), I'd go with Barry Coward.
 
Neither Kindle nor the public library are viable options, and honestly, for $40 I'd want a book that I can physically hold and turn the pages myself. What I'm after are one or two books with reliable information, as I've read that some authors have tweaked a few things, depending on where their preferred interpretation lies. I've been browsing eBay and a couple of other second-hand book sites.

Honestly, what are some people thinking? There is no way in hell that a trade paperback that's not particularly thick, located in Pennsylvania, costs $150 USD to send to Alberta, Canada. The base price of it is comparable to the others of the same title that are sold by other people, most of whom are also in the U.S. Their shipping charges are in the neighborhood of $8-10 USD.

Looks like someone's trying to make the rent in one transaction. That shipping fee is over $200 in Canadian dollars.

I'll have a look for the author you mentioned. Thank you. :)
 
Without wanting to seem as though I am justifying the price of a particular book, you're looking into a pretty specialized topic, and prices for specialized history books (or lit, for me, often) can be high. I have my limits as well, though.

You should read Sir Walter Scott's novels, by the way. Waverly, for instance. Regarding Glencoe, he seems only to have written a poem. But if I remember correctly Waverly is set in roughly the same time period. There's the same Jacobite interest, in any case. He really brings clan life alive. And you should know what another historical novelist treating the same period and culture has already done. Waverly can't cost you more than $20, I wouldn't think.
 
I pretty well have to stick to a budget, not just because the essentials are going up. It's the issue of customs and import fees. Canada doesn't have a lot of leeway for this, and I need to keep orders low enough to not get noticed and dinged for it. Most of the time they've ignored my book orders, but there have been a couple of times when it happened. I can't really afford that, so I'm trying to keep this under $20.

Hmm... I found some interesting stuff on Project Gutenberg...
 
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