This appealed to me because it deals with the 5 years immediately preceding my birth. What was going on as I lay ‘mewling and puking’, uncomprehending of the world around? David Kynaston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kynaston) offers this whopping 880 page social history to set the scene. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period in their own right: neither […]
Modernity Britain: 1957-1962 Read More »
Andrew Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_(historian)) would be the first to point out that there are already thousands of studies of Napoleon already in print (the British Library catalogue lists 13,000 items with the word ‘Napoleon’ in the title field). It takes some guts and ambition, therefore, to seek to add to that number. Fortunately we’re in the hands
Napoleon the Great Read More »
This month I’m only going to make one suggestion. It is Tom Devine’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Devine)(http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/history-classics-archaeology/about-us/staff-profiles?cw_xml=profile_tab1_academic.php?uun=tdevine) monumental 720 page history of Scotland – ‘The Scottish Nation‘. As I write there are 23 days to the referendum which will decide if Scotland remains in a union with the rest of the UK. This will unquestionably be the most historic
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Fancy some classic history writing? You couldn’t do better the The History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) by William Hickling Prescott. This gripping chronicle draws upon the firsthand accounts of eminent 16th-century captains and statesmen to relate the overthrow of the Inca empire by the conquistadors. Historians admire Prescott for his exhaustive, careful, and
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Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama and http://legacy2.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama) prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. The
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The subject is the Vietnam War. Dispatches (1977) reports remarkable front-line encounters with an acid-dazed infantryman who can’t wait to get back into the field and add Viet Cong kills to his long list (‘I just can’t hack it back in the World’, he says); with a helicopter door gunner who fires indiscriminately into crowds
Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kurlansky and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kurlansky) so brilliantly relates here, salt has shaped civilisation from the beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured
Salt: A World History Read More »
Edmund Wilson’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Wilson) magnum opus, To the Finland Station (1940), is a stirring account of revolutionary politics, people, and ideas from the French Revolution through the Paris Commune to the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. The work is really a history of revolutionary thought and the birth of socialism, from its inception in France to the arrival
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The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is an influential and pivotal work of English social history, written by New Left historian E. P. Thompson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson). It concentrates on English artisan and working class society in its formative years 1780 to 1832. Its tone is captured by the oft-quoted line from the preface: ‘I
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