How to get into history?

Mouthwash

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How should I start my entry into history? I would assume that I should start from the beginning (ancient civilizations) work my way up through the Roman, medieval, Enlightenment, and modern periods, and then read more detailed histories of smaller scale events. But is there a methodology to this? Which histories should I begin with? How important or relevant is learning about far Eastern or African history? Are economic histories useful? If I want to check something, would I need an academic library in order to find original documents?

I've recently started "The Crimean War" by Orlando Figes. Is that something I should read without really knowing what was going on during that time, more generally? Some of things he talks about I find bizarre/confusing, like the agreement not to support revolts among European nations.

How do I determine if a book is more or less objective? Are there red flags? Could anyone give me a list of "blacklisted" historians that are apologists or propagandists?
 
Read what interests you.

Start with a nice Cambridge, Oxford, or Princeton University Press-published book on the period. They tend to be well-researched, factually accurate and mostly representative of current historiography. Should serve as a good primer. From there look through the bibliography and further reading section. Learn who the major academics on the period are; their backgrounds, interests, and positions. From there get into specialty books on whatever interests you.

History isn't really at all about facts. History is about interpretation and argument. It changes over time. There's no one "correct" "systematic" way to learn or get into history. The trick is to read a lot, talk to academics, talk to historians (there are several good, well-researched history students, professors, and professionals on these boards who are up to date on their research), and learn the ins and outs of the metadiscussion about the period. From there if it really interests you start looking at primary sources. You can find big books of primary sources on just about any period you want. If you really really like it learn the language, visit major libraries (BL, Library of Congress) and start doing some real research. You're never going to know everything about everything in history. Academics can spend decades researching something like "Women in Late Medieval Yorkshire" and still not know everything there is to know on the topic.

The thing to keep in mind is that when you see somebody like Dachs or Masada or Lord_Baal make long expository posts on history you must not conflate them with some kind of omniscient historical god who knows everything about history. They are just guys who are exceedingly interested in particular eras and read a great deal on them. Dachs knows a lot about WWI and post-1870 Germany because he has read A LOT about that period. Masada knows a lot about SE Asian history because he practically eats and breathes the stuff. Lord_Baal knows a great deal about Nazi Germany in the immediate pre-war years because he wrote a goddamned dissertation on the topic. The trick is to read a lot and always ask questions. Never accept one book as the end all be all.

And if you need book recommendations the thread is here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=300606

So which period interests you?

Oh and another good thing to keep in mind about history: There isn't really such a thing as "history" with facts and dates and narrative. Those big Oxford University Press books are probably the closest thing you're going to get. Rather than thinking of it as a big "history" tent, try to subdivide history further, as there are a ton of disciplines and few historians are experts of absolutely every discipline, even within a narrow region and time frame. Some major types:

Feminist History (really big right now)
Ecological History (really big right now)
Political History
Intellectual History
Economic History
Military History
Cultural History
Urban History
Religious History
Nautical History
Microhistory (big right now)
Transnational History

And that's really just scratching the surface. I'm not saying you should specialize right away: if there's any "wrong" way to do history, that might be it, but again the important part is to just read what interests you.
 
Start off with some Oxford History of the World reference books to get you going. Look also for notable publishers if you want a detailed text about a specific event or period. For a quick military history overview that's an easy read, I recommend: http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0195143663
 
What Owen said. I got into Byzantine history with an Oxford history book.
Also, the collective mind of CFC has a pretty good grasp of history books and could probably recommend you several for a given topic.
 
Some major types:

Feminist History (really big right now)
I would say that there's actually been something of a backlash against explicitly "feminist" history over the last decade or so, and that something called "gendered" history is picking up steam. But yes.
 
What Owen said.

I learned most of my history from introducing myself to a topic through wikipedia, and if I find it interesting enough, I would look for a book or other sources on the topic.

You'll have gaps in whole eras of history, I expect everyone will have gaps. Eventually you'll be curious and look for information in those eras or areas lacking. Or not, which is perfectly fine.

For me, in the past I completely got disinterested in history following the Polish Partitions and subsequent Napoleonic era and had a major knowledge gap of everything between Napoleon and WWI. The past two years I have rescinded this tenet and have been pursuing books on the era and am discovering it too be very fascinating. I am now looking to shifting my attention from Europe to America, and finally familiarize myself with the American Civil War and the boom that followed. :)
 
If history is putting up a fight, try plying it with liquor.

Read what interests you.
This is honestly the best advice any of us could give you. I doubt I'm alone in finding that my interest in history largely stems from playing CIV - this is a website dedicated to that game, after all - and my first historical reading was the Civilopedia. I enjoyed the WWII scenario for Civ II, so I started reading about WWII, which is the exact subject you should allow a five-year old Jewish boy to read about (quality-parenting, that was). Obviously, I'm still interested to this day.

If there is any particular topic that interests you, find a book on it and start reading. Then read others. I can recommend several books on the period of Nazi rule in Germany, and there are other people who can recommend books for other subjects. Dachs can offer a sickening amount of guidance on the late-Roman Empire, for example.

The thing to keep in mind is that when you see somebody like Dachs or Masada or Lord_Baal make long expository posts on history you must not conflate them with some kind of omniscient historical god who knows everything about history. They are just guys who are exceedingly interested in particular eras and read a great deal on them.
This is true. I seem to have a reputation as one of the "Big Three" in the WH forum, which I do not believe for one second I have earnt, but I am more than capable of being wrong. I'm even wrong about my pet area; I know very little about the Pacific Theatre of WWII outside of the initial stages, for example, and my chronic inability to remember names - I cannot, for the life of me, remember the name of the first girl I kissed, despite still knowing her today, which makes for some awkward conversations - forces me to run to Wiki to check spelling every second post.

We here in WH are perfectly capable of being wrong about a subject, and even when we're correct we often don't know the whole story. I originally found out about the planned coup against Hitler in 1938 - a subject I'm talking about in another thread right now - while lurking on these very boards, from someone more knowledgeable than myself; I think it's safe to say I now know more about it than the person who mentioned it. So do your own reading, but do your best to find reputable sources; while there's no such thing as "true history," there's definitely a lot of "false history" out there. Gavin Menzies is a spectacular example of what NOT to read, unless you want to know what crap looks like so you can avoid it in future.

Lord_Baal knows a great deal about Nazi Germany in the immediate pre-war years because he wrote a goddamned dissertation on the topic.
Technically I dropped out of uni to raise my daughter before I got that finished, dude. Still, it's nice someone remembers I was doing that.

I would say that there's actually been something of a backlash against explicitly "feminist" history over the last decade or so, and that something called "gendered" history is picking up steam. But yes.
I've heard of this new "gendered" history, but haven't actually come across any of it yet. Have you? If so, what's it like? I recall feminist history being pretty damn terrible, except in very rare cases (my man-crush, Richard J. Evans, wrote his dissertation on the post-unification pre-Nazi German feminist movement, and while it obviously isn't up to the same level as his later works it's still damn good).
 
Owen Glyndwr said:
The thing to keep in mind is that when you see somebody like Dachs or Masada or Lord_Baal make long expository posts on history you must not conflate them with some kind of omniscient historical god who knows everything about history. They are just guys who are exceedingly interested in particular eras and read a great deal on them.

Stop lying Owen. Dachs is an omniscient historical god.
 
I've heard of this new "gendered" history, but haven't actually come across any of it yet. Have you? If so, what's it like? I recall feminist history being pretty damn terrible, except in very rare cases (my man-crush, Richard J. Evans, wrote his dissertation on the post-unification pre-Nazi German feminist movement, and while it obviously isn't up to the same level as his later works it's still damn good).
Well, "feminist" history's big deal was to analyze women-as-women and the nature of female gender roles in various societies. That's nice, and very important, but it kind of passes over the fact that there's an entire other set of gender roles out there. The performance of masculinity (e.g. military service, dueling culture) could be and can be as much of a traumatic, straitjacketing, transformative, etc. experience as the performance of femininity. Feminist history sort of took/takes a narrower view of things, painting it all as 'male hegemony' with little nuance. While recognizing a basic idea of masculinity, it tends to view challenges to and modifications of that masculine idea as coming pretty much solely from women. Gendered history has been an effort to incorporate feminist history and historiography while at the same time taking a broader and more nuanced view of gender roles in history.
 
I would say that there's actually been something of a backlash against explicitly "feminist" history over the last decade or so, and that something called "gendered" history is picking up steam. But yes.

Yeah, gendered was what I was thinking of. "The role of women in x" are really popular right now and you cannot write a well-regarded history these days without at least paying lip service to what women were doing in the period/era.
 
Just realized that Dachs, Masada, and Owen are all male but have female avatars. :rolleyes:

Would reading alternate history be helpful? 'The Years of Rice and Salt' sounds extremely interesting... from an anthropological perspective as well.
 
Just realized that Dachs, Masada, and Owen are all male but have female avatars. :rolleyes:

Would reading alternate history be helpful? 'The Years of Rice and Salt' sounds extremely interesting... from an anthropological perspective as well.

Depends, as with any history, on the level and quality of research conducted. Some alt history can be very good. Some alt history on this very website is exceptionally good. Some alternate history is exceptionally bad. A good rule of thumb for realistic althistory is to be wary of anything which exceeds 100 years or so past the point of digression. By that point you're getting so far away from history that butterflies render any plausible prediction a complete crapshoot.

Just look at Dachs' 1905 Russians won the Russo-Japanese Manchurian War. He only went on to the mid-late 1920s and even then things have departed drastically from history.

The other important point (and one highly contentious to posters like LightSpectra) is that while history arguably is not deterministic, the point of departure still needs to be something plausible. Otherwise you're kinda getting into somebody's Mary Sue fanfiction. The Russians winning (or drawing) the Manchurian War is plausible. Henri II not being killed in a freak jousting accident is plausible. Arthur living long enough to succeed Henry VII is not plausible. The Black Death increasing its fatality rate by 66% (in non-insular communities) to me sounds like something which is definitely not plausible.

But I don't know; I've never read the book. Maybe somebody with more firsthand experience could weigh in on it.
 
Arthur living long enough to succeed Henry VII is not plausible.

Wait, what's wrong with that? His father only outlived him by seven years, and it seems to have been an unlucky break with disease that killed him. If it was a chronic illness, then perhaps, but that's not the impression Wiki gives.
 
Just realized that Dachs, Masada, and Owen are all male but have female avatars. :rolleyes:

Would reading alternate history be helpful? 'The Years of Rice and Salt' sounds extremely interesting... from an anthropological perspective as well.
And you're not an outrageously funny guy with a Comedy Central show. So?

I don't tend to like most mass-market alternate history books, because usually the alternate history parts are pretty bad alternate history - not plausible departures, like Owen said, or parallelism for the sake of parallelism, and so on - while not actually being very good novels either. Harry Turtledove is the most outrageous of the practitioners of this, but S.M. Stirling and Kim Stanley Robinson do that stuff, too. In my opinion, one of the best works of alternate history, Fatherland, is good precisely because it doesn't get hung up on the history part: Harris just states that the Nazis won the war and otherwise focuses on character development and the noir mystery part.

That tends to mean that alternate historical fiction, even when it is good, doesn't really teach you much about history.

Owen mentioned that I, among other people on CFC, have written alternate history; the link to what is probably my best work is in my sig, under "Alternate History Timeline - Eurasian War". I bring this up less to toot my own horn and more to say that I designed the timeline in the way I did specifically to highlight a lot of misconceptions I feel that most people seem to have regarding the history of the early twentieth century. The writing style, which is sort of dry and history-book-y (certainly not a novel), is not for everyone, but I tried to make it as entertaining as I could within those parameters.

Frequently, historians who make a big deal about alternate history as a tool for understanding history don't really do that very well, either. Niall "Fire His Ass" Ferguson once wrote a book called The Pity of War, in which he claimed, among other things, that the First World War was such a disaster for European society and the world because, supposedly, Imperial Germany was on its way to peacefully creating a European economic union several decades "ahead of schedule", and that the warmongering of the Entente messed that up. Leave aside that the trend, insofar as it was pointing in any direction, was not pointing in that one. There's just simply no way to predict events in the future based on any historical trends with any reliability. The consequences of any given action eighty years in the future are completely unknowable. That's why it's alternate historical fiction.

Several historians - the quintessential paper here is the work of Tetlock and Belkin - think that counterfactual conjectures are less valuable for explaining how things might have happened and more so for explaining why things happened the way they did. You know, more like, "Napoleon could not plausibly have conquered Russia in 1812, because even if X had happened, Y would have probably offset it," and so on, and so forth. Or, "the end of the Western Roman Empire was a pretty close-run thing at several points, and events that effectively amounted to bad luck went against its survival every time". You get the idea.
 
Wait, what's wrong with that? His father only outlived him by seven years, and it seems to have been an unlucky break with disease that killed him. If it was a chronic illness, then perhaps, but that's not the impression Wiki gives.

Really it comes down to how you interpret Arthur's early years. The jury's still out on whether or not he had a "sickly demeanor". I tend to err on the side of "he probably was sickly".
 
Depends, as with any history, on the level and quality of research conducted. Some alt history can be very good. Some alt history on this very website is exceptionally good. Some alternate history is exceptionally bad. A good rule of thumb for realistic althistory is to be wary of anything which exceeds 100 years or so past the point of digression. By that point you're getting so far away from history that butterflies render any plausible prediction a complete crapshoot.

Just look at Dachs' 1905 Russians won the Russo-Japanese Manchurian War. He only went on to the mid-late 1920s and even then things have departed drastically from history.

The other important point (and one highly contentious to posters like LightSpectra) is that while history arguably is not deterministic, the point of departure still needs to be something plausible. Otherwise you're kinda getting into somebody's Mary Sue fanfiction. The Russians winning (or drawing) the Manchurian War is plausible. Henri II not being killed in a freak jousting accident is plausible. Arthur living long enough to succeed Henry VII is not plausible. The Black Death increasing its fatality rate by 66% (in non-insular communities) to me sounds like something which is definitely not plausible.

But I don't know; I've never read the book. Maybe somebody with more firsthand experience could weigh in on it.

No, using freak or irregular circumstances in order to provide a deus ex machina device isn't good writing, I agree. But the entire plot is predicated on it. It's not meant to give you a realistic alternate history scenario, it's meant to explore radical possibilities. It's more useful for understanding historical trends like geopolitics or anthropology. 'Without Warning' takes this concept to an extreme, in which all life in North America is wiped out right before the Iraq War purely to imagine what would happen.

Also, couldn't the Spanish flu have potentially killed 99% of the population if it had appeared in the Middle Ages?
 
No, using freak or irregular circumstances in order to provide a deus ex machina device isn't good writing, I agree. But the entire plot is predicated on it. It's not meant to give you a realistic alternate history scenario, it's meant to explore radical possibilities. It's more useful for understanding historical trends like geopolitics or anthropology. 'Without Warning' takes this concept to an extreme, in which all life in North America is wiped out right before the Iraq War purely to imagine what would happen.

Also, couldn't the Spanish flu have potentially killed 99% of the population if it had appeared in the Middle Ages?

If it's not plausible, what's the point though? You could also posit a scenario in which Rome conquered Germania and Scythia and Pahlava under Trajan and ushered in a golden age of Roman rule which lasted for 2 millennia. Sure it's a thing, but from a historical perspective the thing that makes alt-history so interesting is that it investigates the importance of individual events or characters on the flow of history. Not only are you not really saying anything of any interest or impact (other than that you have a hard on for the Roman Empire), but at this point you're just telling an outright fantasy, rather than performing a historical exercise through the medium of fiction.

To take Dachs' Eurasian War: it's interesting (as Dachs noted previously) because it highlights the tenuousness of the Entente in the leadup to the Great War, while also showing the institutional weakness of the British Navy, the potential for the collapse of both Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, as well as a bunch of other things. It counters the notion that World War I (as we know it) was "inevitable", while simultaneously challenging other common misconceptions about the period. This scenario is interesting and enlightening because the point of departure - A Russian victory over Japan leading to a dramatic realignment of the alliances in Europe, is both plausible and possible. If you don't build a good base to start on you're just pissing in the wind.

Swinging back to this historical fiction you gave us: what does this novel tell us about the Black Death, or disease in the medieval period in general? Is it supposed to tell us that Europe was lucky that the bubonic plague wasn't absurdly fatal? Or that diseases can be debilitating in a world without proper (modern) medical facilities and drugs? If you replace the Plague here with a zombie apocalypse or the advent of the rapture in 1348 would the story be fundamentally different? While it may be interesting from a philosophical standpoint, I don't think the story sounds at all interesting from a historical one.
 
Mouthwash said:
Also, couldn't the Spanish flu have potentially killed 99% of the population if it had appeared in the Middle Ages?

We had no reliable treatment for it in the 1920s, so I'm not sure how it would suddenly become an order of magnitude more virulent. Transportation linkages during the Middle Ages also sucked and the gestation period of influenza is pretty short. So the most likely outcome is a regional outbreak, constrained by sea, desert or whatever other travel barriers get in the way. The Black Death for what it's worth was dangerous because it had a reservoir to hide out in - rats.
 
It's more useful for understanding historical trends like geopolitics or anthropology.

Hey Mouthwash, it's really awesome that you are interested in history and this is a thread that can be very useful for newcomers. I do have one suggestion though. Can you phrase some of your questions a little better, or maybe explain them in a different way ( Ex: Give a hypothetical or actual anecdote)?
 
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