> Person 1: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
> Person 2: ...Are you trying to teach me something?
Tangential, but what resources would you recommend for learning world history (preferably including the non-Western world as well)?
For someone who is not aiming to be an expert or work with source records, but wants to improve their general awareness and erudition.
Pick a country that you've been to, or want to visit, and delve deep into its history: wars, neighbors, food, culture. Personally I find that a lot more interesting than the broad survey-type podcasts and courses.
And reading a history book while you're in the place makes both the book and the place more interesting.
Not even kidding - the AskHistorians reddit. I use their Sunday digest links as a magazine: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search/?q=title%3A%22...
It's filled in both so many gaps and made me increasingly curious about many periods/places that I previously felt disengaged about -- and led to much more reading of actual history
I found this Chinese-Canadian history teacher's course on World Civilization to be interesting. His perspective is unique, no doubt due to his journey growing up a poor immigrant in Toronto, a Yale education, and years in China. His treatment seems to offer his Chinese students a western lense, while also revealing insight into Chinese understanding. He's a charismatic presenter.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLREQ8S3NPaQvNTsYrqph8T4hn...
His more recent work has waded into more speculative and controversial subjects but I don't think his World Civ playlist is itself controversial.
While I agree with the list of recommended podcasts, you may be a reader. It is easier for me to make notes and backup and review when reading. A good history book is a story book as interesting as any novel, with the added benefit of being about real people and events. Fortunately, there are a lot of good popular history authors, but unfortunately there are a lot of bad ones too. I looked at Goodreads and this list is pretty good:
There are so many good podcasts for this. Top of my list are Empire, Fall of Civilizations, The Age of Napoleon, The Rest is History, Saga Thing.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Revolutions + History of Rome, Land of Desire (a remarkably talented hobbyist show on French history), Patrick Wyman's Tides of History which is wrapping up soon after about a billion episodes, American History Tellers, History of India... there's a show for everything, but I think you have to try a few to get a feel for how granular you like and what sort of style calls to you.
And I find podcasts gradually lead me towards books. It's just harder to read a book while walking my dog.
I really enjoy Age of Napoleon as well, it’s my only Patreon sub at the moment.
I really like Crash Course World History. I'm older than the target demographic for this resource to be sure, but it's a great high level overview and having this under my belt helped me feel a little more oriented in every other historical thing I've dabbled in since.
Getting a broad overview of "world history" is useful for having basic context for large events, but, IMHO, history gets so much more interesting and educational when you're deep into individual people's lives and stories. I'm probably a bit biased, but tend to agree with the suggestions that you pick a time and place and dive deep into an individual or event that catches your fancy.
My first BA was in history before I went into tech stuff.
It's honestly a hard question and depends on you. I think there's two core challenges: 1. What would be interesting to you and motivate you 2. Finding quality sources
The first one is easy but the second one is hard if you don't already know a fair amount of history, and there's tons of junk out there.
I'm admittedly pretty snobby on my sources but some recommendations (pick whatever works for you): - The Revolutions podcast is excellent. Made by the same guy as History of Rome - Unironically, the AskHistorians subreddit is a gem. It's hard to find questions with answers. Just search for their Sunday day of reflection posts. It's a compilation of interesting answers - If you're able to get into textbooks (not everyone is), do a search for an intro level textbook that's a short survey of an area/time. For example you find smallish intros to most regions and times from Cambridge
What are you interested in and how do you think you'd enjoy learning?
Wanting to learn world history is like wanting to create one's own programming language.
A more feasible start would be to ask, "What is my world? What trends brought us here? When did they begin and how did they evolve?"
One more source to consider, if you find non-fiction dry (and if you do, I'd start by trying a different history book) is novels. Novelists like Rushdie, Heller, Solzhenitsyn, and a surprising number of sci-fi writers include a lot of history in their books. Clearly, these are not unbiased sources and can't be relied on as your only source, but often make for easy insightful introductions and/or immersive supplements. I'm not even talking about "historical fiction," though some of that is also good. For example, the book "The Killer Angels" about Gettysburg, is sometimes assigned reading in history classes.
Wikipedia and the CNN and BBC.
Honestly, just start with Wikipedia. It's better than most popular books and completely free.
If you find yourself wanting something better, the next steps up are any of the numerous world history books from Oxford/Cambridge university presses. Beyond that you should really be picking more narrow areas/periods to go into.
Wikipedia is emphatically not the place to start for this field. For chemistry, physics, mathematics and parts of biology, sure - any field which has not (yet) been politicised generally is covered quite well on Wikipedia. History has always been politicised and coverage of historical subjects on Wikipedia reflects and is fully dependent on which faction has captured the subject at hand. Even the ('perennial') sources allowed to be used on Wikipedia have been heavily politicised. If you want something resembling an objective take keep away from Wikipedia for anything which is in any way politically sensitive no matter whether you happen to agree to the factions which rule the roost or whether you oppose them. If you're looking for confirmation of your biases, sure go there but keep in mind that what you're reading there is not history but ideologically biased historical fiction.
The amount of politicization that happens on Wiki is vastly overstated and in my experience usually reflects the speaker not seeing their own political biases.
Take, for instance, approaching history from the perspective of seeking an "objective take". That's great if you want to be on the cutting edge of historical methodologies from the 1930s, but it's something we try to disabuse undergrads of today because it's not very useful. The modern view is that all histories are narratives and the job of the historian is to render our understanding of it as fully and fairly as possible. David Stack's paper is a pretty good introduction [0] to this idea.
And so, take a look at the Human History page on Wiki [1]. There are lots of things I disagree with (the use of the term "Hinduism" for LBA religion, the "Cradles of Civilization" view is a particular choice, etc), but it hits a lot of the right points as well. Seriously, you have no idea how few popular history sources almost completely forget that there's a world outside Eurasia. Frankly, the article as a whole is a perfectly adequate introduction to world history, with lots of branching-off points for the things that interest you.
You can choose to go beyond that with things like the 7.5 volume Cambridge World History series [2], but the sheer amount of text makes that terrible advice for most people. Nor can I recommend pop media because the media with the most production value is almost always the worst informationally.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12824
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/series/cambridge-world-histor...
I wish I could upvote this multiple times. However, I hope nobody takes away from this that all history is purely biased and therefore worthless. Reading a history book should be like having a conversation with a well-informed friend: you should expect them to get most things right, talk with others, and feel entitled to your own opinion. But you shouldn't ignore them because they might be wrong or stop talking to them because you differ with them, and definitely not assume you're smarter and more clear thinking than the expert.
It is, but it is a useful question. What you really want is not resources by being able to meet a threshold for:
- logic - critical thinking
After that, depending on your particular bent, you want some facility with languages ( some already dead ). In other words, it genuinely may not be for everyone.
For someone not wishing to be an expert or read source material, like the OC, facility in languages is absolutely not necessary. And history absolutely is valuable and can be accessible to everyone.
<< And history absolutely is valuable and can be accessible to everyone.
Shrug. Little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Giving someone tools to create black hole does not ensure that they will be able to utilize that knowledge in a manner that.. is useful.
In other words, it may not be absolutely necessary, but it is.. not helpful to suggest accessibility is key. If anything, accessibility makes it dumber; not completely unlike systemD in linux. It serves a purpose, but it dumbs things down.
Are you seriously suggesting that one can't learn Roman History without learning to read Latin? That it is better to be ignorant of history than read a few books?
I am suggesting exactly what I am suggesting and I opened with those suggestions in the very first post.
By that I mean:
- learn to think critically - learn to apply logic
After that, the world is your oyster, but if you actually want to learn.. and not just.. consume what someone else throws at you, then it will be worthwhile to, you know, learn a thing or two: like, for example, language of the primary sources. I know. I know. There I go gate keeping again.
I will try to narrow it down a little:
"Reading a few books gives you a sketch of an idea someone else had."
Does that help?
Anyone have an archive link? Despite being a history teacher myself I don't have a historytoday login
By the way, you can simply input archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph before the link and it will either take you to the archived page, or let you archive a new one. Like: archive.is/https://www.historytoday.com/archive/making-history/those-wh...
Unfortunately this article has not been archived. The only content available at archive.is right now is a stub.
And the victors write it.
Those who can, make history
But do they? Study history and you'll learn about the Great Man theory of history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory) and its problems.
They do make history, but history makes them too.
Sure they do, not on their own but they are often the ones who set in motion things which are later described in terms of 'making history'. When an orchestra plays a symphony it is often the conductor who receives the praise even though he is not the one actually playing the instruments. Without them he'd be standing there waving his baton without any results. Without the conductor the musicians would certainly be able to produce music but it is unlikely they'd be making history as an orchestra. The conductor gets the praise because he's the one who brings the musicians together to 'make history'. Battles aren't won single-handedly by generals but they are lost without them. Coaches do not win sports competitions but teams without good coaching are unlikely to win. This does not diminish the role of the individual musician, soldier or athlete but it does show that it often takes someone to gather these individuals into a coherent group and point them at a target to 'make history'.
Hard paywall.
Sadly, paywalled.