No.3430
These are some history books I've been reading lately.
The Story of Civilization Part 11: The Age of Napoleon. I'm usually not a fan of Will Durant but this is book provides a good synopsis of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era in France. Those parts of the book make a nice little companion piece to David Chandler's "Campaigns of Napoleon". The book spreads itself too thing, though, by trying to cover every facet of Western Civilization during that period. For example, there's an entire chapter dedicated to Beethoven and several more just about poets and philosophers of the time. It's just too much to tackle in a meaningful way in just a single volume. Even the three-volume Encyclopedia of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars failed to do that. Interestingly, neither that work or this has a section about Edmund Burke. There are offhand mentions made here and there (usually portraying him as the embodiment of stuffy English opposition to the revolutionaries) but no serious examination of him like there is about the other significant English philosophers of his day. This is especially surprising from Durant given his fascination with the history of philosophy.
The Italian Wars 1494-1559. This is the book I could find covering what was essentially the first modern European conflict. It does a decent job of giving a rundown of the events without doing that gay pop-history thing of trying to be like a novel. Personally I would have liked a little more focus on the military aspect over the political but I realize that's just my own autism.
Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suliman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe. This covers roughly the same period as the Italian Wars but focuses on the lives of the titular four rulers who dominated Europe in the first half of the 16th century. Most of the figures it discusses, outside of those four, are portrayed in a rather one-dimensional way. It reminded me of the documentaries the History Channel used to air before it became all about pawnshops and aliens. Overall, it's okay I guess.
China Condensed Absolute shit. It reads like a summery of a Wikipedia article but without citing any sources and even more fabrications. It presents highly contested theories (like the Huns being the same people as the Xiongnu) and legends as facts. It's also very biased; it glorifies China as much as it can while also pushing modern leftist ideas whenever possible. For example, there's a part where it suggest that a certain female usurper was only unpopular because of "male chauvinism". I'd recommend it as a book for small children if it wasn't full of so much bullshit.
China: A Macro History. This is a much better book on the history of China. The author was an officer in the Chinese Nationalist army so it's impossible for it to be unbiased regarding more modern Chinese history but there is much more of an effort to be objective than in the previous book. This book gives a sketch of Chinese history from the bronze age up to the 1990's about as well as any single volume work can.
What history books have you been reading? You are reading history books instead of watching cuckime, right? You do know that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, don't you?
No.3431
Been reading this recently after seeing it mentioned on wizchan, pretty good and this section mentions how studying psychological warfare throughout history can give a better understanding than typical history books.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htmAlso shows how ridiculous major battles could be back in the old days
>This type of psychological warfare device-the use of unfamiliar instruments to excite panic-is common in the history of all ancient countries. In China, the Emperor-usurper Wang Mang on one occasion tried to destroy the Hunnish tribes with an army that included heavy detachments of military sorcerers, even though the Han Military Emperor had found orthodox methods the most reliable; Wang Mang got whipped at this. But he was an incurable innovator and in 23 A.D., while trying to put down some highly successful rebels, he collected all the animals out of the Imperial menagerie and sent them along to scare the enemy: tigers, rhinoceri, and elephants were included. The rebels hit first, killing the Imperial General Wang Sun, and in the excitement the animals got loose in the Imperial army where they panicked the men. A hurricane which happened to be raging at the same time enhanced the excitement. No.3432
>>3431>wang manghehehehehehehehe
No.3442
The Rise and Fall of Sweden as a Military Superpower 1611-1721. This gives an overview of Swedish military conflicts from the reign of Gustav Adolph to Karl XII. The author is biased in favor of Sweden but not to the degree that he ignores the faults of the Swedes and he presents the opinions of other historians alongside his own on debated points. It does exactly wat it sets out to do.
Samuel Rawson Gardiner's The Thirty Years War. As you can gather from the title, it's about the Thirty Years' War. I think this is a very good book despite, or maybe because of, the fact that it's 150 years old. The author seems to place most of the blame for the war on the Holy Roman Empire's clusterfuck of a political system and he portrays everyone involved in the conflict, with the exception of Gustav Adolph and maybe one or two French commanders, as drooling retards whose every success happened only because of luck. If recent history is anything to go by, that's probably the most realistic view.
The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane. This is the only English language book about Tamerlane I could get my hands on well, there was another one but it said on the back that it's "half history half travelogue" and that put me off; I don't care about some faggot writer's paid vacation. It's basically a series of essays detailing how his government was set up and his policies towards different issues. The major events of Tamerlane's life are mentioned but only briefly most of the time. It's valuable if you're interested in that specific area of his life I guess.
The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: The Middle Ages 768-1487 and The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: Renaissance to Revolution 1492-1792. Two books that list the the major conflicts which took place between the rise of Charlemagne and the rise of Napoleon with contemporary artwork alongside each one. The explanations are very shallow but they work well enough for quick reference material. It's a better alternative to Wikipedia in my opinion. My only complaint is that, while the Renaissance to Revolution volume covers conflicts around the world, the Middle Ages volume only convers Europe.
No.3463
I've been reading a lot of the Osprey books. The illustrations are great and there's a lot of good information about the smaller details of the militaries but the tone of the writing is far from objective or professional, almost juvenile at points. I suspect a lot of these are ghostwritten by grad students.
No.3466
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20063Theodoric the Goth: Barbarian Champion of Civilisation by Thomas HodgkinIt's partly a biography of Theodoric the Great and partly just a good overview of Late Antiquity from the barbarians' point of view.
No.3474
>The Italian Wars 1494-1559
I got interested in this one, it's super rare to find any books on the topic. Maybe you should read about the Borgias to get something extra out of it.
No.3478
>>3474Yeah, the one I mentioned is the only book I know of in English that specifically covers the wars of that whole period in Italy. Francesco Guicciardini, a friend of Machiavelli who lived through the conflict, wrote a 20 volume book about the entire history of Italy from 1490 to 1534. It's been translated and is on archive.org but I haven't read it yet.
It's a subject that deserves a lot more attention. The clash of all the different approaches to warfare alone makes it fascinating. It's almost cuckime tier at points. And it was all going on at the same time Cortes and Pizarro were fighting the Aztecs and the Incas.
No.3719
Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939. To my knowledge, this is the only book in the English language specifically devoted to the subject of how ethnic Germans were treated in Poland in the years leading up to World War 2. It's actually quite objective and makes no attempt to whitewash the Polish Government's persecutions of it's German minority. To give you an idea, these are some passage from the latter part of the book,
"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Polish state was bent on the elimination of most of the German minority in western Poland-by forced assimilation where possible, but mainly by coerced emigration. Moreover, this goal was well on the way to being achieved in 1939; the Poznanian wojewode reportedly assured his supporters that within three years there would no longer be any Germans in Poland. A study of the minority's actual political, cultural, and economic situation merely reinforces the pessimistic assessments of contemporaries cited above. The fact that Hitler took up the minority's case several months before he launched World War II was perhaps the overriding consideration at the time, but it does not make the fact of the minority's plight less compelling."
"The "plight" of the German minority in Poland, in other words, was real; it was not merely alleged or fabricated in the interest of Nazi propaganda… Germans in Poland had ample justification for their complaints; their prospects for even medium-term survival were bleak; and no German government more principled than Hitler's would have been able to ignore their plight over the long run. Though it was not politic to make these points at the time, there is no reason why they cannot be accepted half a century later."
