Recent comments in /f/history

ideonode t1_j0bybvj wrote

Reply to Bookclub Wednesday! by AutoModerator

I finished two hefty books this week:

The first was Thomas Asbridge's The Crusades. It's an excellent overview of the Crusades, with perspectives from both sides. Perhaps understandably, it focuses in on the Third Crusade as the centrepiece of the narrative, tracking the endeavours of Saladin and the Lionheart closely. It perhaps rushes the later Crusades a bit, but that might have been a necessary editorial step to stop the book becoming too daunting. I've got Dan Jones' book on the Crusades in my to-be-read pile, and I've also got Roger Crowley's Accursed Tower (specifically on the siege of Acre) on my radar too. Someone here mentioned The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, which I might try to pick up too.

The second book I finished this week was The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club by Christopher de Hamel. Not quite narrative history, it tells the story of 12 medieaval manuscript collectors over time, starting with St Anselm, and tracking through to the 20th Century. It's very much a follow-up volume to his excellent Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. The author is an expert in his field, and has some firsthand experience of some of the manuscripts discussed. He imagines meeting each of the twelve collectors, which could sound affecting, but is actually endearing. Thoroughly recommended. The hardback volume of Posthumous Papers is sumptuously illustrated with medieval manuscripts (word of advice: the hardback of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts was also beautifully illustrated, but when it was published in paperback, they apparently dropped most of the colour illustrations. The same might happen to Posthumous Papers...)

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nola_throwaway53826 t1_j0buzio wrote

Reply to Bookclub Wednesday! by AutoModerator

Does anyone have any recommendations for any books about Korea in the second world war? I'd like to know more about life there during the war, and especially about the Allied troops coming in at the end.

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VarunOB t1_j0bpknw wrote

Reply to Bookclub Wednesday! by AutoModerator

Looking for a starting point to The German Revolution of 1918-19. The Internet has thrown up a bunch of options, including a book called November 1918 by Robert Gerwarth but I'd like to know which are the books those of you keen on the subject would recommend.

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Twolostsouls94 t1_j0booaw wrote

Reply to Bookclub Wednesday! by AutoModerator

Hi, I’m looking for some book recommendations at the moment. Specifically, I’m looking for non-fiction books which look at misconceptions about the past, and inform the reader about what things were actually like. For example, I’ve been looking into books that center around what samurai were actually like, as opposed to all the stories and myths we have about them. At the moment I’m not interested in any particular time period, and am interested in almost anything that fits my criteria.

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banestyrelsen t1_j0bmiow wrote

Reply to comment by MorrisonsLament in How do countries that lack long, ancient histories and myths (or feel they lack it), or have lost all records of them, compensate for this loss or absence? Can these invented ancient myths become as "legitimate" as the truly old histories/myths of countries that have them? by raori921

And in “continental” Scandinavia the problem is compounded because we have so few very few sources of our own that we rely heavily on Icelandic sources, but we can’t assume that what people believed in Iceland is the same as what they believed in Denmark or Sweden; there may have been significant regional differences.

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