Help Ariel Learn (More) History!

[lionofgod]

I finally got around to reading Poul Anderson's Boat of a Million Years this weekend, and it has reminded me that I missed most of ancient history in school due to poor teaching and poor timing. I've picked up a reasonable amount here and there ("Everything I Know About History I Learned from the Metropolitan Museum of Art" could be a pretty thick

Comments

[avacon]

I found Russka to be a great book for getting a good flavor of the past ~1000 years of Russian history. (Just finished it yesterday.)

[nakor]

For a survey, I like "History According to Bob." Buy a few of the CDs and listen to them on your commute.

It sounds like you want ancient history, not medieval-or-later. Because communications were so bad then, there are few good survey texts. You will need to find a text on Greece, a text on Rome, etc. If you start with a modern survey of Rome, you can then read Livy and Cassius Dio and understand where they're coming from and what political biases show in their work. If you start with a survey of Greek, you can then read Herodotus and Thucydides. After a survey and primary sources, then it's a good time to read focused, scholarly work on whichever parts interest you.

If you start with the primary sources, it's hard to understand what they aren't saying. If you start with the modern scholars, it's easy to be misled.

[tla]

Despite being a Byzantine historian, I know shockingly little about ancient Greece. I recently found a book by Tom Holland called "Persian Fire", which is a very well-written introduction to the history about which Herodotus wrote. (Herodotus himself, I understand, is a good read, but I've not yet had a chance to get to it. This book made me want to do so sooner rather than later.)

For Byzantine history, Judith Herrin (a well-respected scholar) has just published a mass-market book ("Byzantium") that is a very good overview, though not in a chronological format.

And if you want the entertaining overview, there's the Cartoon History of the Universe, parts 1-whatever.

[kyrandil]

I actually feel I learned a lot of Roman history by having taking Latin 1-3 in high school. (1-2 were just language with some light history, Latin 3 was just half the Aeneid) Once I was done with that I had no difficulty reading other primary sources.

Not that this helps in the general case. It's also not clear what you'll be able to pick up about Carthage since the Romans did a pretty good job of obliterating them.