Reddit mentions: The best european history books

MFE,

We’ve had such a delightful string of evenings “together” that I’m only now finally finishing responding to your foreign film message. : )

I’ve seen Seven Samurai, but I think that’s the only one of Kurosawa’s that I’ve seen and I’m afraid I don’t remember it too well. What do you like about his works?

Watching the trailers, I see a lot of parallels to American westerns. How much influence did Kurosawa have on them or they on him?

Ran looks so elegant to me, but I can’t tell if that’s just the score and the way the trailer is cut. Dreams looks amazing. Also, as I watched the trailer, the voiceover wording going from “as a child” to “as a man” struck me. Are there things in Kurosawa’s films that speak to the man you have been, the man you are, and/or the man you are becoming (not that you need to become any different than you are, but we are all constantly changing and growing).

I haven’t seen Tampopo or the trilogy. You calling them tops means I definitely need to see them at some point. : )

Have I told you how much I love Fifth Element? Yet, I haven’t seen any of his others. I love, love, love that the right song was needed before the chase could commence. Oh, and how funny about the guy throwing up. You’d think that’d be par for the course with the driving that goes into a car chase, yet I’ve never seen that shown!

The line from Clockwise about him showing off his muscles and her egging him on reminded me of us: you showing your mental muscle in so many ways and me very much appreciating and enjoying your displays of intellectual prowess.

Nightwatch and Daywatch look mesmerizing. I don’t watch a lot of horror, but those look very good and well worth the chills.

Oh, how have I let myself slip into so much work and so few movies? La Vie En Rose looks amazing! : )

I’ll return the favor, but I notice as I think back on the foreign language films I enjoy that I’ve rarely seen any of them more than once or twice. I think that gets down to the whole multi-tasking thing and in-home media entertainment tending to be a backdrop for manual activities.

And now I’m laughing at how that came out, but I’m going to leave it in just in case you get a laugh out of it too. : )

So, the foreign film that really sticks out for me is Life is Beautiful. The idea that a man could have such a soul as to create that world of charming adventure for his child in a concentration camp blows me away.

(These are more in order of how much I can remember about them rather than in order of favorites.)

The next one I’ve seen enough to remember is Das Boot. War isn’t my first choice of relaxing subject matters, but I think it’s a beautiful film. It has that Ran elegance about it. While the war part isn’t a draw, I love technology and you know how I feel about water, so submarines are pretty amazing. I’ve enjoyed tremendously the ones (all docked) that I’ve toured.

The film 3 Iron (which seems available in its entirety is a quietly surreal piece that leaves you wondering at the end what really happened.

Pan’s Labrynth was visually complex with many scary and rough moments that were are richly detailed as they were discomforting.

O’Horton was just cute. It wasn’t a top favorite, but it’s a warm, sweet film.

The rest I have just the barest memories of, but they all were compelling enough that I’d watch them again if time allowed for it. They include [Like Water for Chocolate] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqm8_GjKDBc), Fanny and Alexander, and [Babette’s Feast] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvNifgj_dv4).

I feel like I have seen this one, but I’m not positive. : )

>And I love to make you smile

) You telling me that widens the one you’d already put there. : )

>How is it the Poms seem to have a corner on the Science-Fiction-Comedy?

Just from comparing the wiki pages on British humor and sci fi, I wonder if some of the fit is because the invented portions of people, worlds, and mechanisms are easy targets for sarcasm and the awkwardness of some to function in those unique and demanding settings for self-deprecation. Additionally, humor based on insensitivity to cultural differences can be more acceptable when the culture being joked about is fictional.

I think the inventiveness of Brits (in which the Scots seemed to play no mean role) plays well into a genre called a “literature of ideas” and that depends on the reader/viewer’s ability to be comfortable with new and unusual scientific explanations and solutions .

>Just plain not freezing properly and ruining it for one of the audience...letting someone down.

Oh, that plays into so many things we’ve talked about, doesn’t it? I’ve mentioned the utter enjoyment a woman can have being active around a man even when he prefers to be more staid, and the thought that you might worry even about your ability to be appropriately staid makes my heart go out to you. Yes, I do know the part, though, to do with worrying about letting someone down. Given our conversations about what I do not feel comfortable with in terms of adventure, mine seems to run the opposite course in worrying about my ability to be appropriately active without causing anyone emotional or physical harm.

>Had the old magazine kept moving along, I would probably still be doing it.

I will direct my wishes toward whatever you want to have happen whether it’s to be done with magazine editing or to have some opportunity that you would like materialize. I don’t think it’s a secret that I admire your mind, spirit, and writing. You have a gift, but how you will most enjoy that gift is completely up to you. : )

The Dakar video was amazing. That would be so awesome to do. I read a little bit about Dakar rally and learned what erg is. What would be your vehicle of choice for the rally?

Sama Amie seems to capture well the intensity, risk, and vibrance of the rally as well as the simple of joy of pursuing something complex and thrilling. : )

The headings are great on the picture of the issue cover you linked, and what a great image! : )

>My reporting writing isn't all that great.

I’m sure you know my default is both to beg to differ because of the high qualities I see in your writing while simultaneously deferring to your self-knowledge. Why do you think it isn’t great?

>At the eleventh hour the entire rally was cancelled due to terrorism/security concerns.

I’m so sorry that happened. The world will never know all the little dealings for good that get lost in the vast mis-shufflings of greed.

>Which one would you like me to post?

Please choose what you would like to give me. Your writing of any sort is a gift to me. I’d love for you to pick something out. : )

>sock...black the next day. And the next...

So if I see you in jet, onyx, ebony, obsidian, slate, or raven, I know something has gone terribly wrong, right? : )

>I have to try and figure out who's chopping onions in my front room, can't seem to find 'em.

Good to know I’m not the only one who has welled up on more than one occasion. You fill me with joy to the point of it overflowing onto my cheeks and past my through-my-tears smiles.

better lAte than never

Edit: corralling links

On science and evolution:

Genetics is where it's at. There is a ton of good fossil evidence, but genetics actually proves it on paper. Most books you can get through your local library (even by interlibrary loan) so you don't have to shell out for them just to read them.

Books:

The Making of the Fittest outlines many new forensic proofs of evolution. Fossil genes are an important aspect... they prove common ancestry. Did you know that humans have the gene for Vitamin C synthesis? (which would allow us to synthesize Vitamin C from our food instead of having to ingest it directly from fruit?) Many mammals have the same gene, but through a mutation, we lost the functionality, but it still hangs around.

Deep Ancestry proves the "out of Africa" hypothesis of human origins. It's no longer even a debate. MtDNA and Y-Chromosome DNA can be traced back directly to where our species began.

To give more rounded arguments, Hitchens can't be beat: God Is Not Great and The Portable Atheist (which is an overview of the best atheist writings in history, and one which I cannot recommend highly enough). Also, Dawkin's book The Greatest Show on Earth is a good overview of evolution.

General science: Stephen Hawking's books The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time are excellent for laying the groundwork from Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity through to the modern discovery of Quantum Mechanics.

Bertrand Russell and Thomas Paine are also excellent sources for philosophical, humanist, atheist thought; but they are included in the aforementioned Portable Atheist... but I have read much of their writings otherwise, and they are very good.

Also a subscription to a good peer-reviewed journal such as Nature is awesome, but can be expensive and very in depth.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is also an excellent look at the human mind and genetics. To understand how the mind works, is almost your most important tool. If you know why people say the horrible things they do, you can see their words for what they are... you can see past what they say and see the mechanisms behind the words.

I've also been studying Zen for about a year. It's non-theistic and classed as "eastern philosophy". The Way of Zen kept me from losing my mind after deconverting and then struggling with the thought of a purposeless life and no future. I found it absolutely necessary to root out the remainder of the harmful indoctrination that still existed in my mind; and finally allowed me to see reality as it is instead of overlaying an ideology or worldview on everything.

Also, learn about the universe. Astronomy has been a useful tool for me. I can point my telescope at a galaxy that is more than 20 million light years away and say to someone, "See that galaxy? It took over 20 million years for the light from that galaxy to reach your eye." Creationists scoff at millions of years and say that it's a fantasy; but the universe provides real proof of "deep time" you can see with your own eyes.

Videos:

I recommend books first, because they are the best way to learn, but there are also very good video series out there.

BestofScience has an amazing series on evolution.

AronRa's Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism is awesome.

Thunderfoot's Why do people laugh at creationists is good.

Atheistcoffee's Why I am no longer a creationist is also good.

Also check out TheraminTrees for more on the psychology of religion; Potholer54 on The Big Bang to Us Made Easy; and Evid3nc3's series on deconversion.

Also check out the Evolution Documentary Youtube Channel for some of the world's best documentary series on evolution and science.

I'm sure I've overlooked something here... but that's some stuff off the top of my head. If you have any questions about anything, or just need to talk, send me a message!

Since I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the questions right now, I'm going to copy and paste two answers I've given to similar question in earlier threads. (One of which is a copy-and-paste job itself.)


1. General books:

I'm going to copy and paste an answer I once gave to someone who asked me for book recommendations via private message.

>Hi there!

>No Problem! Always glad to help. If you need a quick overview over the topic or are rather unfamiliar with it The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings gives a good first impression. Else Roesdahl's The Vikings is a bit more in depth but with less pictures. There's also Peter Sawyer's Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings. All three of those are slightly outdated but they give a great first impression of the Age. If money's thight, start with Sawyer, then Roesdahl, then the atlas.

>If you want to go more in depth there's The Viking World by Stefan Brink and Neil Price. Do not confuse it with the book of the same name by Graham-Campbell and Wilson, which is rather outdated. This "Viking World" is a collection of essays by the world's leading experts on the period an the de facto standard of the discipline at the moment. It's well worth the price.

>If you are (or at least read) German (which is possible from your username) try to get the current catalogue of the Haithabu museum. It gives a good overview over that important trading settlement. Or even better: visit there! (Or any of the large Scandinavian National Museums (Moesgård, Statens Historiska museet, or the Viking ship museums in Roskilde and Oslo, respectively).

>If you are interested in the world of the sagas you can't go wrong with Jesse Byock's Viking Age Iceland.

>If you are looking for a quick ressource or if you have a specific question there's the site of The Viking Answer Lady. She appears to be a reenactor not a scholar but her answers are very well sourced and I have yet to find a major error on her site. Or you can always ask me/post to AskHistorians...

>cheers, wee_little_puppetman


Also, you might want to check out this huge annotated Viking movie list.

There's also a rather good three part BBC series on the Vikings on Youtube.

And for some quick Viking fun there's the animated short The Saga of Biorn.

Oh, one more thing: You might also enjoy Viking Empires by Angelo Forte, Richard Oram and Frederik Pedersen. It goes beyond the traditional end of the Viking Age into the Middle Ages and should therefore tie in nicely to your main interest in the crusades.



2. Sagas

Egils saga and Njáls saga are usually the ones that are recomennded for first time readers. They feel very modern in their narrative structures. Grettis saga is also quite good for a start. And then maybe Laxdæla saga. If you aren't specifically interested in Iceland and want to start with something that conforms more to the public picture of "Vikings" try Eiriks saga rauða, Jómsvíkinga saga or Sverris saga. But afterwards you have to read at least one Icelander saga (i.e. one of the ones I mentioned first)!

Icelandic sagas are fascinating but you have to commit to them. Don't be disappointed if a chapter begins with two pages of the family tree of a minor character! And always keep in mind that this is medieval literature: although it might look like it it is not history. These things were written in the 12th to 14th centuries, even if the take place much earlier!

A lot of people here are giving shitty answers and not helping because they disprove of your use of "dark ages."
On behalf on the internet I apologize. They are giving you crap for not knowing something you have expressed interest in learning about.
I am fascinated by the "Dark ages" and I have a history degree and I'm still using the term. I understand it to usually mean "the medieval times" or "the huge time-span that is not usually taught to the average student." Most history in public schools (at least that I've seen) tends to gloss over the time from the Romans to the early renaissance so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that's the era you want. It's my favorite era to study for that reason - most people know so little about this 1000 year span in history.
A good starter book for you would be A world lit only by Fire I loved this book. It's not overly scholarly and is a good read.
Another great one is Mysteries of the Middle Ages... Thomas Cahill is a great writer and if this version of the paperback is anything like my copy it is a visually stunning read. I discovered him through "How the Irish Saved Civilization" which was also great.
Mark Kurlansky's books (Salt and Cod specifically come to mind) are well written, specific histories that cover parts of this time period.
I wish my books weren't still packed (recently moved) because I want to dig through the stack and share them all. :) I suck at remembering names of stuff. I recommend browsing the amazon pages section of "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" for other good recommendations.
Happy Reading!! :)
edit - just remembered this one on the byzantine empire of all the books I've read on the Byzantines, that one is my favorite.

edit I'm getting a lashing for "A World Lit Only By Fire" due to the fact that it contains historical inaccuracies.
Please read this one instead In the year 1000.
I'm not trying to recommend dry scholarly tomes, I am trying to think of books that are fun, interesting, and entertaining to read while still being informative.

I'm no expert in Medieval or Old-Norse studies, however I've do have an interest in it & from some searching on various different aspects of the Vikings I come across these:

The Cambridge History of Scandinavia: Volume 1. Prehistory to 1520 it's a anthological survey book consisting of both historiographical and hagiographical (biographies of saints) primary & secondary sources ranging from prehistory ( before historical events were documented) through to medieval history of Scandinavia. It's quite pricey but definitely worth the money if your serious...

>The first part of the volume surveys the prehistoric and historic Scandinavian landscape and its natural resources, and tells how man took possession of this landscape, adapting culturally to changing natural conditions and developing various types of community throughout the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. The rest - and most substantial part of the volume - deals with the history of Scandinavia from the Viking Age to the end of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (c. 1520). The external Viking expansion opened Scandinavia to European influence to a hitherto unknown degree. A Christian church organisation was established, the first towns came into being, and the unification of the three medieval kingdoms of Scandinavia began, coinciding with the formation of the unique Icelandic 'Free State'.

The History of Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Denmark,Finland and Iceland) is similar to Cambridge History yet significantly cheaper

The Viking World by Stefan Brink & Neil Price is a mid-range anthological book compromising of many articles from various scholars.

>I would really appreciate material that covers linguistics.....philology, morphology and the like
As for the other categories, I would really appreciate some introductory material on archaeology.

This book will probably be the best one for you because it includes all of the above.

Myth and Religion of the North: the Religion Ancient Scandinavia this book is a good overview of the different mythologies before the christianisation of the nordics.

Women in the Viking Age is a good book on the niche subject area of Women roles within the viking age nordics & its various colonies (from Greenland to Russia). Jesch uses various pieces of evidence from archaeological finds, runic inscriptions, historical records & Old Norse literature.

I would also recommend you look into the Icelandic sagas & Eddas. I'd use SagaDB because there are many various different icelandic sagas & in a variety of languages including English, Icelandic & Old Norse. If you'd like to go about learning O.N. you check the Viking Society for Northern Research or check out the books: A New Introduction to Old Norse: I Grammar: 1 or Viking Language 1: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas

If you're interested at all in the presence of the Vikings (and later scandinavians) in Eastern Europe check out Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe

Hopefully this helps if you have any more specific questions don't be afraid to ask :)

All the podcasts already mentioned are amazing, I highly recommed Hardcore History and History of Rome to start. [Western] history begins with the Greeks and the Romans, I personally find the Romans far more fascinating (and History of Rome covers it all, sorta, hooray!). A great read for the Greeks is Persian Fire by Holland (already mentioned and my favorite history author). You can continue learning about Rome by listening to 12 Byzantine Rulers by Lars Brownworth. If you learn Roman history you follow a timeline from 750 BC to 1450 AD. In Our Time is produced by the BBC and covers a ton of subjects.

Almost every old text is already posted on Librivox, and lots of lesser know works. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The History of the Peloponnesian War are two very famous ones. I personally enjoy Jacob Abbott with Richard I-III being pretty good. It's all read by volunteers so some tolerance is expected.

You have months if not years of free podcasts to listen to, however I also love Audible for history. One of my favorites is The History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill, all four volumes are on there; it covers mostly British history, but much of Europe and all of American history (his telling of the Revolutionary and Civil wars are amazing) from before Romans to 1900 AD. You can also listen to the whole book if you liked Brownworths podcast on Eastern Rome/Byzantium.

Since you don't know where to start I'll just list some of my favorites. The Vikings influence on history is quite enthralling. The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is the best there is. Hannibal of Carthage is easily one of the most famous generals of all time, so you might as well enjoy the Battle of Cannae.

One of my favorite reads is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it's like the tv show Band of Brothers...but you're Hitlers brother, and you learn how frighteningly easy it all was (and you get a great understanding of Russia). Honestly though, just listen to all of Dan Carlin's podcasts, my favorites being Bubonic Nukes and Prophets of Doom (this one takes a while to get going, but the decent into madness is fascinating). Understand that not everything is going to be accurate, so enjoy the stories but dont focus on memorizing the details, and if something interests you enough seek out some deeper material on it.

edited some more links.

I had a post regarding my recommended books on the rise of Islam. I'll post it here again for your benefit:

> Here's the best ones: Efraim Karsh's Islamic Imperialism: A History and Robert Hoyland's In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire

> Edit: I have read the two books aforementioned, but I'd also recommend this book, which I haven't read: Hugh Kennedy's The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In. All these books fit your criteria. I also have Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, but I think this is the least recommendable because of the controversy swirling around it and the documentary it spawned. But it is interesting nevertheless.

I hope this will help!

EDIT: I'll add more recommendations, in regards to the Golden Age of Islam:

• G.R. Hawtings's The First Dynasty of Islam
  
• Amira K. Bennison's The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the 'Abbasid Empire
  
• Benson Bobrick's The Caliph's Splendor: Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad
  
• Halil Inalcik's The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600
  
• S. Frederick Starr's Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane
  
• Michael H. Morgan's Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists
  
• Jim al-Khalili's The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us The Renaissance

> How do you rebutt Christians who claim that prophecies like [Isaiah 53] predicted Jesus and his death?

This is a very, very complex passage. There are literally entire books about proper interpretation of ancient texts; say what you want about the legitimacy of OT scripture, it is a historical document that requires an understanding of the context and culture of its writing. For a brief primer, check this out.

>I have parents that are anti-evolution but know nothing about it. What can I do (if anything) to show them that evolution is fact.

You can do nothing if they are unwilling to investigate it on their own. Being against something you are (willfully) ignorant of is, with all due respect, the epitome of ineptitude.

>Not some wacky theory that some drunken scientist came up with after beating his wife, but fact.

I'm honestly not aware of any well publicized scientific theory that originated from a drunken, wife beating scientist, so there's nothing I can contrast this with. (However, I'm convinced John was on shrooms when he wrote Revelation) If there is any hope, I would begin with the proper explanation of what a "theory" is in the scientific perspective. To simplify (and probably over-simplify), something can still be a theory, scientifically, but also be a fact.

As a demonstration, I would tell them to jump off a bridge. After all, gravity is only a theory.

>Have a favourite Dawkins quote? :)

Yup.

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

>What single argument was the single greatest point in debunking your creationism? (I ask because I often debate creationists).

Genetics. By far. The DNA evidence is astounding. I highly suggest The Relics of Eden and The Making of the Fittest.

>f I have any questions about the Bible I'll be sure to message you. You sound quite knowledgable on it. Cheers!

I would welcome it. At least I could now put some practical use to all this knowledge in my head. :)

Decades ago, I read an essay where the author claimed that the natural, entropic state of human societies was some form of fascism/feudalism. At the time I was outraged, thinking that we've made such progress that he could not be correct! But I've since come to agree with him. We really do have to fight to get a free and tolerant government, but if we say "yay! we did it!" and relax, we can expect to see it slide back toward rigid authoritarianism.

Everyone says that they love freedom, but a majority of people are secretly afraid of it. They'd rather have a secure predictable life over freedom, because true freedom includes the freedom to fail.

> undergone this process ever notice or fix these things.

The book that opened my eyes to how this can happen in real life (as opposed to 1984 or Animal Farm or It Can Happen Here - all excellent books, but fiction) was: They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

> why u say hadith and sirah? I thought the sirah is just the lifestory of muhammad and this is found in the ahadith. Also the tafsirs use hadith. And i think there r many different sirahs, all leaving out stuff xD by modern authors etc.

When I say hadith, I generally mean sahih bukhari, sahih muslim etc. When I say sirah I mean biography of Muhammad by ibn ishaq/ibn hisham, one of the earliest biographies of Muhammad.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Prophetic_biography

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ibn_Ishaq#/Biography_of_Muhammad

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ibn_Hisham

> I dont want to correct u, but i want to understand xD

No you have pretty good knowledge actually. Feel free to correct me whenever I make a mistake. I want to learn the Islam as objective as possible, as I have no intention to practice taqiyya lol

> Such fascinating ideas on how islam came to be xD gonna get that book

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Sword-Birth-Global-Empire/dp/0307473651

This is the book. You may find it a pdf online maybe, or order it online. But definitely read it.

About last part, yeah I agree. Even though the cult leader Muhammad we encounter in hadith and other sources seem so real, the fact that there's so little written evidence about Islam's origins is a something to think about. When Umar(supposedly) conquered Jerusalem in 640, why didn't he wrote down a Quran? Why didn't they write a biography of Muhammad, or their history in general? Holland again says that for example even when barbarian tribes invaded Roman Empire, like the Germanic tribes in Britain, even their king stopped and wrote down books. But these people, whose motivation is built upon a "holy book", don't write down shit for at least 100 years. The name Muhammad start to appear in 690-710. The first manuscripts of Quran came from 8th century, why? And even then they are incomplete. And they were distributed in Umayyad era, while traditional muslim belief is that Uthman distributed those copies. Where is Uthman's Quran, the first Quran? Again, the belief is that a Umayyad ruler burned it. WTF lol! There's no original Quran. How are we going to be sure that Umayyads didn't sit down, observed Judaism, Christianity and wrote down a book according to that, while putting info from various other sources?(embryology in the Quran and other stuff)

If you like history, try the following.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Utterly fascinating and extremely well written. It reads almost like a novel.

Peter the Great and Dreadnought by Robert Massie. Both excellent.

Citizens is a jaw-dropping revisionist history of the French Revolution by Simon Schama.

Night Soldiers is a superb "historical spy" novel set in Europe before and during WWII. This novel by Furst is credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the espionage genre. Think Graham Greene crossed with John le Carré.

If you like science fiction, try Hyperion by Dan Simmons. A mind-bending book that, at its core and rather incongruously, is a retelling of Canterbury Tales.

Sticking with science fiction, try anything by Iain M Banks; especially his Culture novels. You could start with Consider Phlebas, or Use of Weapons.


I have many many more suggestions if you want.


You may also like LibraryThing, a great social networking site for those who love books and like to catalogue and discuss their personal libraries. Look me up if you want. I'm "omaca" there too.

Bear with me here, I swear I will get to the food stuff, but first a bit of background.

The sources we have for these voyages (a collection of sagas and two other works known as "The Book of the Icelanders" and "The Book of Settlement") are all at least 2-4 centuries later than the supposed dates of exploration. This is a fairly typical problem in Scandinavian history. These are oral tales handed down for several generations and then written. The info in them is thus problematic. All that being said, archaeological evidence and our understanding that just because something is "fantastic" doesn't make it "fantastical" all point to a Scandinavian presence at the very northernmost areas of Canada.

North Atlantic travel and exploration consists of four major locations: Iceland, Greenland, Helluland (likely the island of Baffin in far northern Canada) and Vinland (modern Newfoundland).

Travelers to North America would have been coming from Iceland (the major North Atlantic settlement area) and Greenland (much less well settled and abandoned by the 14th century).

And now on to the food. Fish, fish, and fish would have been a primary food source. Some fresh, much of it salted and preserved. Blubber and whale meat are a possibility as well (though they probably would not have actively whaled during their voyages). Meat (seal and caribou especially if coming from Greenland), salted or even fresh. Also sea-birds. For a particularly amusing glimpse of what things might have looked like, check out this (admittedly very blurry) video of a reenactment of a voyage from Ireland to America, in which a fellow is picked up solely for his ability to catch birds and fish.

They would also have had livestock, pigs, sheep, and perhaps even cattle, that could be fresh slaughtered but would ideally have been kept for secondary production (cheese, milk, wool etc.). We know from archaeological remains and from patterns of settlement westward that these voyages would have included both men and women and thus probably were supplied with the necessary goods (including farm animals) to at least begin settlement. This means that they might also have had cereal for planting and cultivation.

It is best to think of the voyagers to America and the North Atlantic as rather distinct from the "Vikings" most famous for raiding England, Ireland and Francia in the 9th century. These are not bands of warriors looking to make money and head back home to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. They are explorers and above all settlers, looking for new lands and new opportunities.

Sources: The first and best place to go is The absurdly large edited volume, The Viking World which has several articles on North Atlantic settlement and travel, all of which have bibliographies.

Happy reading!

Depends what you mean by "modern" - within the last thirty years? I can't speak for non-fiction but 80s fiction was very much up its own backside, so I wouldn't bother with the majority of it.

I can't think of any modern non-fiction that springs to mind as something I'd recommend; most of the big best-sellers seem to me to rely too much on a formula (find some obscure or forgotten nugget of past history/technology, spin it into a thrilling tale of lone hero against forces of human and natural obfuscation, and finish with triumphant victory of new theory/field/better mouse-trap).

That being said, I did enjoy Jacques Barzun's 2000 [From Dawn To Decadence] (https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Decadence-Present-Western-Cultural/dp/0060928832); I can't say I agreed with all of his conclusions, but I did enjoy the broad sweep of history and the chance to see a French-centric perspective as a change from the usual England and America-centric one you generally get in such historical reviews.

Also it's a brick of a book in the original hardback and gave my wrists good exercise in building up strength merely holding the damn thing to read it :-)

No one book will be able to illustrate the nuance and character of all of human history. I assume you want to start with the west? Say, the last 500 years or so?

• $$: Jacque Barzun has a very good history of the last 500 years with a focus on the west. From Dawn to Decadence. He has been critiqued for being a bit conservative, but I find him more stodgy than anything else.
  
  
• FREE: To be a good radical, you should probably read A People's History of the United States as well. It will give you a picture of colonialism and a view of those who didn't come out on top.
  
  
• $$: The above is also a graphic novel available on Amazon.
  
  
• FREE: Finally, check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. He's a bit opposite of me politically, but I'm an extreme case, and his passionate presentation far outweigh my ideological quibbles. For depreavity in war, check out his series Ghosts of the Osfront in the archive. Amazing.
  
  edit: corrected links

Fantastic recommendation, I got to read Junger's memoir last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. Absolutely horrifying and enlightening.

One of my favorite WWI books is A World Undone, by G. J. Meyer. Which is ironic since I don't think I've ever posted a single anecdote from it (an error I need to severely correct).

It's super dense, but probably one of the best overviews of the war, encapsulating a deep amount of academic research, primary sources from soldiers, civilians, leaders- all the while providing important historical context and background for the many many actors/nations involved, their motives, and goals.

I recommend this book to ANYONE interested in WWI besides a passing understanding. At 816 pages it can be daunting to most readers, but if you have the interest, absolutely check out this book.

Another great book is Max Hastings's Inferno, which is one of the best "social histories" of the war IMO. The wide-range of intimate, tragic, surprising, and sometimes funny testimonies collected in the book, along with Hastings's excellent prose, is one of the most "human" retellings of WWII, I've ever read and is a must for anyone who is interested in the war beyond just the military and political aspects.

Edit: I also want to include Hastings's Retribution which covers the Pacific campaign (1944-45) in equally masterful prose and heartwrenching testimony. Learned not only a lot about the Japanese perspective but also of people's lives under Japanese occupation.

Also Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy, which is a fantastic (American POV) of the war and incredibly well written.

The Variational Principles of Mechanics by Lanczos is an amazing book for understanding calculus of variations. The majority of it covers ODEs rather than PDEs / field equations, but to be honest the book is so good that the generalization to field theory is almost obvious. It does have a chapter or two on fields though. The book has the most beautiful economy of words I've ever seen in a textbook, concise and yet crystal clear. Also, the book is cheap! Just $16 at Amazon right now. It's definitely written for physicists, it's not a math book at all.

I can't say enough good things about this book. Reading it was the first time I understood calculus of variations. He actually explains what you are doing conceptually when you vary a path, whereas I feel like most physics books introduce it solely as a mathematical manipulation. I finally gained a good intuition for it.

My introduction to calculus of variations in field theory came through classical electrodynamics in Landau & Lifshitz and Jackson. I agree that those books don't tell you at all how it works; they just start performing manipulations and you just follow what they do.

Hi!

My name is Ed McDonald and I'm a fantasy author. My debut is going to be released across 6 languages in 2017/18, so I have some insights on this. I am looking forward to Blackwing being published so that I don't have to write this as a disclaimer all the time :D. I'm also speaking on a panel about getting published in fantasy at the London Book Fair in March.

Firstly, read fantasy. All the fantasy. But it's more important to read the things that are currently being published than it is the classics. You won't learn much from Tolkien these days, times have changed since LOTR. Instead, if it's epic fantasy you want to write, then you need to read Rothfuss, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Lawrence and Lynch. They are the big sellers for epic. If you want to write YA stuff then read YA stuff. This is not just because those writers are great, but because it will teach you the market trends.

Next though, reading outside the genre is great, but only to find books that you enjoy so that you can cut them apart. My guilty pleasure? Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. They frequently have glaring plot holes or don't make sense, and are full of deus ex machina resolutions or just "and then Jack blew his head off" finales, but the pace and the simplicity keeps me turning the page. And from that, I learned that I much prefer a Reacher novel to trudging through 5 pages of world building at a time, so when I write fantasy, I write fast paced thrillers which is what then sold Blackwing around the world. I wouldn't have gained that style without reading outside the genre.

Finally, I guess I'm cheating because I have some degrees in history, but if you're writing historically inspired settings, you ought to be reading some history. Don't try to plough through dry academic texts if you aren't a historian though - I'm an academic and even I find those dry as sand. Get the popular stuff, even kid's history, just to try to soak up the feel of the period. The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England is essential for those that want to gain a quick overview.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486802982&sr=1-1&keywords=the+time+traveller%27s+guide+to+medieval+england

I write a blog that mainly focuses on assisting aspiring authors such as yourself and you may find some of it helpful.

https://edmcdonaldwriting.com/2017/01/25/you-are-not-george-rr-martin-how-to-get-published-in-the-grimdark-era-of-fantasy/

The book Monatillou has a chapter on Time and Space-- which discusses how the peasants, clergy, shepherds and craftspeople measured their day, year, life and history--

SMITHSONIAN:
>Montaillou is a tiny quiet village in the roughest and most inaccessible part of the backward out-of-the-way Ariège department in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The village has existed since at least the time of Charlemagne, but it has never played any part in history, never been on any beaten track, never had a famous son, and its contribution to the national economy has always been close to zero. "The end of the earth," one of its older inhabitants calls it, with a certain affection....

>a source of pure joy to modern historians and readers....For they come as near as anything can to satisfying the curiosity at the heart of our interest in history: what was life really like in the old days? What did people do all their livelong days, what did they talk about, what did they think about?... The track led back and forth through the whole physical, economic, emotional, spiritual life of Montaillou.

It's not focused entirely on the Eastern Roman Empire (it deals heavily with the Sasanid Empire and Arabia as well), but Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire is a great read that tries to explore the general religious and political themes of Late Antiquity. He spends over 200 pages detailing the developments that moulded Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism in this time, and the way those eventually fed into the evolution of Islam. He also discusses current events, like wars, legal reforms, and plague, all of which had wide-ranging effects. Due to the scope of the topics covered, it's necessarily a pretty broad and general overview of the centuries you're interested in; if you want to really delve into specifics, I'm sure other suggestions will have narrower subjects. But I can't recommend Holland enough; he's engaging and accessible, heavily focused on context without getting caught up in trying to sell his own narratives, and the pages are peppered with fascinating anecdotes about individuals and events that really give you a feel for an age that seems so remote but has had such a lasting impact on our world.

Are you sure about that? I'm not very learned yet, but I read one of John McWhorter's books and pretty much the whole thing is him talking about how there are certain grammatical concepts like 'do' that had to come from Celtic languages. After all it's a pretty unique thing and the Celtic languages are the only ones that have something just like it. And in any case, Early Modern English sounds like way too late for it to appear. I think I remember reading that those grammatical trends were incorporated into spoken English pretty much immediately, although they didn't show up in writing until a couple centuries after the Norman Invasion, when people started to actually write in English again.

There seems to often be this sort of tragedy of the commons with the elementary courses in mathematics. Basically the issue is that the subject has too much utility. Be assured that it is very rich in mathematical aesthetic, but courses, specifically those aimed at teaching tools to people who are not in the field, tend to lose that charm. It is quite a shame that it's not taught with all the beautiful geometric interpretations that underlie the theory.

As far as texts, if you like physics, I can not recommend highly enough this book by Lanczos. On the surface it's about classical mechanics(some physics background will be needed), but at its heart it's a course on dynamical systems, Diff EQs, and variational principles. The nice thing about the physics perspective is that you're almost always working with a physically interpretable picture in mind. That is, when you are trying to describe the motion of a physical system, you can always visualize that system in your mind's eye (at least in classical mechanics).

I've also read through some of this book and found it to be very well written. It's highly regarded, and from what I read it did a very good job touching on the stuff that's normally brushed over. But it is a long read for sure.

Barbara Tuchman was brilliant writer of history.

Albert Camus was a brilliant absurdist philosopher and novelist.

Jared Diamond has written some brilliant books at the intersection of anthropology and ecology. Another good book in this genre is Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World.

Gwynne Dyer is an acclaimed military historian turned journalist on international affairs who has written a number of very engaging books on warfare and politics. His most recent book Climate Wars is the ONE book I would recommend to someone, if so limited, on the subject as it embodies both a wonderful synopsis of the science juxtaposed against the harsh realpolitiks and potential fates of humankind that may unfold unless we can manage to tackle the matter seriously, soon. Another great book on climate change is Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.

For social activists interested in ending world hunger and abject poverty, I can recommend: Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom; Nobel Prize winning micro-financier Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism; UN MDG famed economist Jeffrey Sach's End Of Poverty; and Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea

For anyone of Scottish heritage, I heartily recommend Arthur Hermann's How The Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

For naval history buffs: Robert K. Massie's Dreadnought.

Last, but not least: Robert Pirsig's classic Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Enjoy!

I'm only a recently active poster, but I hope to remain so. I just moved and I'm between jobs so I started writing a novel (stave off madness from the job boards) and was looking for some strong critiques. I really like the premise of a semi-enforced give to get critical community, because it helps build the skills of everybody involved.

I was an English major, but also always an avid reader, so my favorite books have a bit of a range (representative not comprehensive):

• Gatsby, Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury
  
• Song of Ice and Fire, His Dark Materials
  
• Harry Potter
  
• Moby Dick
  
• Paradise Lost, The Odyssey
  
• Citizens, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Last Lion Churchill series, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  
  I'm predisposed to find things I like in almost any piece, but because I can find really great gems I try to be rough on the rough spots. I'm most drawn to anything that is true to life, even in the most fantastical situations.

Start with The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey. It's a great read and it will introduce you to a lot of concepts of the early middle ages in a fun and very informative way.

Then I'd move on to books by Joeseph and Frances Gies, particularly Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, and Life in a Medieval Village (the last one being my personal favorite, although village life is especially interesting to me). You really can't go wrong with any Gies books though, so if one catches your eye, go for it.

Then, when you're ready to go into further depth, move onto the books of G. G. Coulton. They were mostly written in the early 20th century so they can be a little dry, but holy smokes the guy was an erudite medievalist, and many authors and researchers owe a lot to him.

BONUS: If, like me, you become interested in the village life aspect of the middle ages, there are some primary documents that you can find online too. I recommend at least The Rules of Robert Grosseteste, Seneschaucie, and Robert of Henley's Husbandry (I don't know what that site is, it was just the first one that came up on my search results).

The transformation of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich was gradual.

> "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

> "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

> "You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

> "Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

> "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

> "How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

> "Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

> "Yes," I said.

> "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

> "Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

> "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

> "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

> "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

> "You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

> "Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Herman Mayer - They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45

It's How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Similar titles include How the Irish Saved Civilization, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, and Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. None of them are by the same author, but they're all interesting historical books with similar titles (How some great culture did great things that built what we have now), none the less.

I would love to find similar titles about other countries, cultures, and civilizations. They're always so interesting!

Hey folks. I used to be a big war history book buff back when I was a kid, but got out of it in later years. However playing some BF1 and realizing that my WWI knowledge was pretty spotty got me looking for a book to brush up. I recently finished this guy and wanted to say that I really recommend it.

https://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1503508652&sr=8-5&keywords=WWI+history

Trying to do a comprehensive war overview book is always fraught with peril. There is so much to cover and you need to do justice to all the major events while not turning into just a continual series of dates and casualty numbers. This book does a great job of balancing covering the action on the battlefields along with the homefronts and other political topics. I also liked how it helped to connect you to some of the major characters and empires by giving small side-chapters to fill in the background on them (The Romanovs, Ludendorff, The Ottoman Empire). Way less dry than John Keegan's "The First World War." Probably the best full war history book that I've read, it's pretty amazing how much it crams in without being too much of a doorstop.

There's lots! Of course, that means it's sometimes hard to pick out highly specialized articles from more general updates on the state of the field, which I suspect is what you're going for. Don't get daunted if this seems too dense; sometimes it's just good to know a bit about what's out there.

As a starting point, I'd recommend taking a look at Brink and Price, eds., The Viking World (2008) [Amazon link so you can preview the table of contents]. I'd start with the introduction (it's short), then technology and trade, and then urbanism or any other sections that seem necessary for you.

An older book, but one that's still very influential is Hodges and Whitehouse's Muhammad, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe (1983). It will give you a good idea of what scholars think was happening, but there's been a lot of research and updates to it over the last 30 years. Before you cite Hodges and Whitehouse, I'd cross reference it with a more recent work, using the table of contents or index to focus your reading. In particular, I'd look at Skre's Means of Exchange (2007) (see especially Skre's intro and conclusion as well as Kilger's "Kaupang from Afar") and McCormick's Origins of the European Economy (2001). They're both great works, but based on how you described your project, I wouldn't risk getting stuck in a quagmire trying to read them both all the way through.

Finally, there's a few terrific articles that should be read if you can:

• Steven P. Ashby, “What Really Caused the Viking Age? The Social Context of Raiding and Exploration,” Archaeological Dialogues 22.1 (2015): 89-106. [Sorry: the link doesn't give the full article, just the abstract.]
  
  
• James Barrett, “Rounding Up the Usual Suspects: Causation and the Viking Age Diaspora,” in Atholl Anderson, James H. Barrett, and Katherine V. Boyle, eds., The Global Origins and Development of Seafaring (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2010), 289-302.
  
  
• Ulf Näsman, “Exchange and Politics: The Eighth–Early Ninth Century in Denmark,” in Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham, eds., The Long Eighth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2000): 35-68.
  
  
• Søren M. Sindbæk, “Silver Economies and Social Ties: Long-Distance Interaction, Long-Term Investments – and Why the Viking Age Happened,” in James Graham-Campbell, Søren M. Sindbæk, and Gareth Williams, eds., Silver Economies, Monetisation and Society in Scandinavia, AD 800–1100 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011), 41–65.

Come now, that's too sweet of you. And yeah, I myself am imprisoned by my books too. I dread the ideas of moving due to the sheer amount of books I have. I thought I was done with it since I bought a kindle 5 years ago but I threw it away after half a year 'cause I could not be without my hardcover books. And sometimes I feel like putting a good book under my pillow or on my night stand makes me feel closer to the book itself. Now if only I can read everything that I own is another problem...

Those are some solid suggestions. I definitely would love to devour...I mean read and appreciate them someday. I have to finish House of Leaves first. Goddamn it's exhausting to read that book but also quite rewarding. I also just ordered The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Was thinking about either medieval time or the growth of the Silk Road and ended up with medieval time.

We are such book worms, aren't we? I'd feel so bad if I end up with someone who doesn't like books 'cause I would be so boring and reading all the time.

For a more comprehensive look at Europe in the 20th century, touching on WW1, WW2, and The Cold War I suggest Out of Ashes by Konrad H. Jarausch. You can find reviews online and everyone is jizzing their pants over it, but I'm halfway through and I really like it. He's a great writer. For WW1 specifically, I'd suggest [A World Undone by G.J. Meyer] (http://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449775167&sr=1-10&keywords=ww1). I didn't read it personally, but my bff is a huge military historian and she liked that it gave a larger global viewpoint than other more European-centric ones. I haven't read it yet (but she keeps bugging me to lol).

Ehh, I more feel like myself, and any other like minded individual has an absolute responsibility and duty as both American citizens, and as human beings who would like to see our fellow men & women we share this planet with live, happy, healthy, fulfilling lives. From that perspective, the current president of the United States is one of the single greatest existential threats to any of us getting to see a more prosperous of brighter tomorrow.

He is a would be tyrant, who maybe just maybe, is too stupid and incompetent to stage a hostile takeover of our democratic republic. But we can not allow ourselves to become complacent in the security of our lives ever again, and we must strive everyday to do everything we can to rid ourselves of this cancer sooner rather than later.

I'm done now, I've said my piece...I'll do my best to avoid politics on this board going forward. Just know that no matter how safe and insular your life feels, tyranny can always be around the next corner.

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

Most of my knowledge regarding the matter is European, so I'm going to give a list of my favorites regarding the European / African front.

To get the German perspective of the war, I'd recommend:

• Panzer Commander - Hans von Luck - One of my favorites
  
  
• Panzer Leader - Heinz Guderian - He developed Blitzkrieg tactics
  
  
• The Rommel Papers - Erwin Rommel - Written by my favorite German Field Marshal up until his forced suicide by Hitler. Good read of the Western and African theaters of war. Also a good book to read if you're interested in what German command was doing on the lead up to D-Day.
  
  I have a few battle-specific books I enjoy too:
  
  
• Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943 - You really don't know the brutality of Stalingrad till you've read this book. You'll see it in a whole new light I think.
  
  
• Berlin: Downfall 1945 - Battle of Berlin at the end of the war, another good book.
  
  Now if you want to play games, Hearts of Iron series is great (someone recommended the Darkest Hour release of the game. Allows you to play historical missions based on historical troop layouts, or play the entire war as a nation. Historical events are incorporated into the game. While you'll rarely get a 100% accurate game as it is abstracted, it is an excellent way to see what challenges faced the nations of the time. You could play as Russia from 1936 and prepare yourself for the eventual German invasion. Or maybe you decide to play as Germany, and not invade Russia. But will Russia invade you when they are stronger? Will warn you: It does not have a learning curve. As with almost all Paradox Interactive games, it is a learning cliff.

With English history, I would start with the Romans. The "very short introduction" books have shown up in my old reading lists on multiple occasions at university.



I would then move on to the vikings. Again look at "a very short introduction". I would also look at "The Viking World". This is the textbook I used at Uni.


(Now we get to medieval England, my favourite) Look at the history of the medieval church christianity was central to medieval life. Look at the Black Death King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England, it is one of my favourite books of all time and an absolute pleasure to read. This book is a very good overview of medieval Europe This book is also a very good, but brief, introduction. I would read that one before the other one.


The Hundred Years war is an important part of English and French history. The Hundred Years War is a good brief book.



Now we get to the War of the Roses (if you like game of thrones, this is what it is based on). Hicks, M. A., The war of the Roses (2003). He wrote another longer book in 2010. Both are very good, but the 2003 book is much much smaller.


I never studied the Tudors or Stuarts at uni but I am sure someone else would be able to direct you to good books. When buying books look for "University Press" books. They are written buy lecturers and professors, world leaders in their field.


The Empire Project is a very good book, but not as small as the others I have suggested (well, except for the viking age one).


Don't be disheartened by the amount of books I have suggested, I promise the majority are tiny and pictures do take up a lot of room. If you were to combine them, they probably would be as many words as 2 big books. Wait for the books to become cheap or call up a university second hand book shop to see if they have them in stock. Again I highly recommend the "a very short introduction" books if you want to get to know an area of history without making the commitment of buying larger more expensive books. If you want my old reading lists I can send them too you if you PM me.

You will get more out of them without question, but is that "more" worth the effort? I don't think so, unless you want to really nerd out and/or pursue the subject academically. Get some good, recent translations by folks like Jackson Crawford or Carolyne Larrington. And then if you are still looking to squeeze some "more" out of the texts, go get some good, thorough introductive litterature to contextualize the sagas and poems you are reading, like The Vikings, A Handbook to Eddic Poetry, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, The Viking World etc.

And this is coming from someone who do know Old Norse.

When people learn a second language, the structural differences between the first and second languages tend to be the hardest to pick up. For example, if your first language doesn't have honorific speech levels like Japanese or Korean, then you may never pick them up if you can communicate (albeit roughly) without them. Another example might be a complex case system like Russian. If you can make yourself understood in the second language without all the subtlety of total mastery then you may never take the time (or even be able) to master it.

The history of England (and the British Isles in general) is one of repeated invasion. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes displaced the Britons. The Vikings invaded and displaced the locals. Then the Normans invaded a thousand years ago and replaced the elite. Each invasion and displacement rubbed away some of the complexities as locals and invaders alike learned to communicate, and each introduced a layer of vocabulary. As a consequence, English now has very few of the grammatical features that make Germanic languages Germanic. John McWhorter put it like this:

> English's Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer - antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on - antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.

For a very easy introduction to English (and the source of that wonderful analogy) see Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

I can't recommend much in the way of math books, but I can give you some more hints on what you should be looking for and reading about.

The specific problem that you've asked about isn't quite undergrad level material, unfortunately. Here's a document that introduces most of the relevant topics:

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/sasane/ma305.pdf

I can't guarantee that it will be helpful, but everything in that document is relevant to what you're looking for. You might use the table of contents or the introductory section to prime your wikipedia searches.

Basically, you specifically want to learn about optimization theory (which is what a lot of control theory is about).

Optimization, at its most basic, is not hard. An example of an optimization problem is to find the value of x that minimizes (or maximizes) some function f(x).

This is something that's covered in basic calculus. If f(x) has only one minimum/maximum (aka an extremum), then you can solve the problem easy by solving the equation df(x)/dx = 0.

Things get harder when you have constraints - maybe you want the value of x such that a<x<b, that minimizes f(x). In that case you use things like lagrange multipliers and the KKT conditions, which allow you to deal with constraints on your solutions.

I linked to wikipedia there, but the wiki pages aren't necessarily the best resources for learning this stuff. If you search for those things, though, you'll find a lot of good resources, because many people are in the same boat as you about this stuff.

Your problem is a bit trickier than basic optimization, though - in your case, you're trying to minimize a functional, which is a function that takes another function as an argument, and returns a number. The solution to that problem is a function. So, instead of using regular calculus and finding where the derivative is zero, you use variational calculus and find where the derivative is zero.

I can't recommend a specific book about this subject, but I can recommend a book that's very closely related: The Variational Principles of Mechanics. It's an excellent physics book that explains things in terms of variational calculus. The principle of least action is one way of solving physics problems, and it's very similar to the problem that you're asking about.

I can reccommend Richard Hoffman or Jeffrey Foreng for a good general overview. For a more popular science/easy read experience there's Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie who is known for easy reading and entertainment value while still being historically accurate.

Links:
http://books.google.se/books?id=ZhYmAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Richard+Hoffmann%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=ik1NU5KgJZP14QT1jIGAAQ&ved=0CFQQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.se/books?id=SOdNT0xFnJsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Jeffrey+L.+Forgeng%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=hU1NU7j0IOa34ASE6IHIDQ&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.amazon.com/Montaillou-The-Promised-Land-Error/dp/0807615986

Hope that helps, if you have any follow up questions just ask!

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun

The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin

I love these kinds of history books (along with the frequently mentioned "Brief History of Nearly Everything") that summarize a great deal of knowledge and history into one book. I don't need to be a specialist on one particular event or period or place, but I love to just have a general context and understanding of historical trends and events. I feel like a well read person should be able to have a conversation with an expert in any subject without embarrassing themselves. You don't need to know everything but you shouldn't be ignorant.

I'm assuming by medieval/renaissance you mean the traditional European inspired fantasy. Here's a brain dump:

Feudalism:
I feel like I see a lot of fantasy where heroes turn up at some village and get asked to fight someone or other because the villagers have nowhere else to turn to. What I don't often see is the local knight living in the manor across the field whose responsibility it is to be a warrior and protect his fief and who probably doesn't appreciate strangers turning up and undermining his authority by doing his job for him.

There would probably also be a lot of small wars going on at any given time between knights and barons and earls that provide lots of work for dangerous people but have nothing to do with the greater battle battle between good and evil.

Knighthood:
Speaking of knights a knight isn't "someone who fights with plate armour and a sword," that's what they were IRL because that was the most effective way to fight and you needed a certain amount of wealth and status to afford the huge investment in training and equipment. If you have a fantasy world where with enough training and expensive equipment people can learn to shoot fire and call down lightning that will break a cavalry charge then that world's knights will almost certainly all be wizards. And very few other people will be allowed to be.

Era-appropriate firearms:

• https://www.pinterest.nz/pin/538672805409922868
  
• https://www.pinterest.nz/pin/511721576383944160
  
  That aesthetic of people in plate armour with cannons is something you almost never see depicted.
  
  Renaissance fashion:
  
• https://i-h1.pinimg.com/564x/67/7c/4d/677c4de51094fe521abab26318dc5f19.jpg
  
• http://blog.sunandswords.com/post/143679221560/some-awesome-photos-taken-last-week-of-my-kit
  
• https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ae/56/85/ae5685d3f34f0a1a777ca2a587d8cf54.jpg
  
  Speaks for itself.
  
  Medieval medicine and science:
  A physician diagnosing you by cross referencing your symptoms with the alignment of the stars to decide how to properly balance your humors isn't something I've seen a lot of in fantasy. That element of earnestly applying the scientific method to things you don't understand based on what seem to us like completely ridiculous variables and assumptions. Also more folk medicine like plants that only had medicinal properties if you found them by accident or sympathetic magic like curing a rabid dog bite using the literal hair of the dog that bit you.
  
  On a similar note you don't see a lot of importance put on folk superstition like hanging horseshoes above doors to keep out evil spirits/the devil/elves trying to steal your children. I feel like basing a fantasy world's idea of magic around the small everyday things might make a change from the usual Big Magic stuff.
  
  
  The equator:
  Not really something that will affect the day-to-day feel of a world but I read once that some people believed that the equator was hotter because it was closer to the sun and that right on the equator it would be too hot for anything to survive or cross. So they thought the entire southern hemisphere was inaccessible due to this deadly heat barrier. Not sure what you could do with it but I thought it was a neat idea. Maybe the discovery or creation of a tunnel under the equator would be an interesting way to introducing a "new world" to explore that developed totally independently.
  
  The devil:
  You know where medieval people got magic powers? By serving the devil. You know how they became werewolves? Made a deal with the devil. You know how women learned arithmetic? You better believe that's the devil. A lot of fantasy treats the monsters and magic and whatnot as just the natural flora and fauna of the world but these days I don't feel like I've seen much that filters the world through that lens of everything comes from one or two sources that have strong moral stances associated with them and, therefore, everything that comes from them does too.
  
  Pilgrimages:
  I don't know, you just never see them in fantasy but in the middle ages they were quite the thing from the noble woman who spends ten years of her life travelling constantly between holy sites to the common folk for whom the trip to visit the bones of St Whoever is basically the closest they ever have to a holiday.
  
  Ships:
  Don't have your medieval knights cross the sea on what amounts to a 17th century galleon like I feel like I keep seeing. Not when there are cool medieval and renaissance ships you could use:
  
• Byzantine Dromon: https://ferrebeekeeper.wordpress.com/tag/dromon/
  
• Venetian Galleass: https://www.deviantart.com/radojavor/art/Battle-Of-Lepanto-41693977
  
• Look, we built towers on it and now it's a war ship: http://users.trytel.com/tristan/towns/florilegium/images2/def14b.jpg
  
  Level of material wealth/standard of living:
  When you turn up in a sleepy little farming village there probably won't be a big inn with a roaring fire, a dinner menu and a dozen rentable rooms. There will be a family that'll let you sleep on the floor of their one-room cottage for a few coins and might even share some of their latest batch of beer with you. Even the lord of the castle may very well sleep in the same room as their whole family and several servants. When you try to sell your stack of looted swords to the local blacksmith they aren't going to have cash sitting around to pay you. But they could offer you a box of nails and some of the loaves of bread the baker owes them.
  
  Little things:
  I feel like a lot of the reason "medieval" fantasy tends to feel stale is that it's mostly made up of just all the bits and pieces of history that people are familiar with smooshed together. Good for acccessibility, bad for originality. Often just adding little details or taking away familiar things can make a difference. Look up the things they had in place of anything resembling modern law enforcement like Tithings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithing) and the Hue and Cry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry) or people bringing their own mugs to taverns because the taverns couldn't just buy bulk mugs off the shelf or the fact that it could take members of ten different guilds to make a suit of armour and anyone trying to do the bits that are covered by another guild will find themselves out of work pretty quick. Maybe read something like https://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571. Look up medieval bestiaries to learn how lions are born dead and brought to life by their mothers or how vultures can see the future.

I did go to that subreddit. I just kinda thought I wanted to become learned and try to make my New And Special country a bit more realistic history wise. That's what I'm asking for things to read about those centuries. Plus, even if I throw realism out the window, studying history will tell me what to fill my country with content wise.

I must point out you said historical specification is important, but then you generalize about the whole middle ages and explain why a democracy would be impossible during that period. That's the kind of broad history I'm interested in.

But I do wish to learn. I want to find things I can fill my fictional history with in terms of content. Events I could add that take place in it's 400 years of history. What would you recommend I read? How do I avoid anachronisms?

Let me give two books I think would actually help me

From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun

A Brief History of France

The Seventeenth Century: Europe 1598-1715

Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945 were superb narrative histories of World War Two in the East. On the American end, the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy - An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle are great. I think somebody else mentioned The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. Just the first paragraph of that book is worth the price of the paperback.

If you're not into the whole military thing, The Worst Hard Time by Tim Egan covers the dustbowl era in the southern plains. Reads like an epic novel.

All of these suggestions prioritize craft of writing over intellectual rigor. I studied history, so I have a keen appreciation for the value (and the limits) of academic history. These books are not that sort of history, though I don't think any of them get any facts egregiously wrong. It's just that they're remarkable for being well-written - which should appeal to a fiction enthusiast - not for being pathbreaking academic treatments of their subject matter.

It seems to me that the two strengths of the series are world-building and character depth. If this is your favorite series, you probably like it for one or both of those things.

If you like it for the world building, I recommend history books such as the History of the Peloponnesian War or A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

If you like complex characters, then the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Another strength of asoiaf is that it isn't too heavy handed regarding magic in the story, and this is a strength of the Mistborn series too.

This should be at the top, as it really helps to rephrase the question. To anyone else interested: energy conservation is a direct consequence of an "action principle" combined with a symmetry, so the question should instead be,

"Why is nature so well-described by action principles, and why is physics invariant if you shift the time coordinate?"

This is stuff that physicists still debate and try to understand, so you're not going to get a definitive answer.

But you can get some intuition about why these things should be true. For the second question, it's pretty natural to think of all times as being "equivalent" in the eyes of physical law. Then it makes sense that shifting in time should be a symmetry.

Unfortunately, the former question is a little harder to dig if you're five. If anybody is interested: one way to understand it is to get a physical intuition for D'Alembert's principle. Doing some work then gets you to Hamilton's principle, which is what the first question is talking about; see e.g. chapter 5.1 of this book for a derivation.

If it's mediaeval Europe you're after, and first-person in particular, the Paston Letters might be a good place to start. That particular edition uses modern spelling and has explanatory notes, but you can also play on hard mode for free here.

Montaillou is third person, but rich in detail - an amazing book about an inquisition into heresy in fourteenth-century France. I can't recommend it enough.

PART II

BUT there are problems with your prose too

There are times where you really do TELL us stuff that you should not.

>We had no idea of the horrors that lay ahead, only that the world we left was not alone. Someone had made a life here, someone not of our land, so it stood to reason that there were more of them out there and a new land that perhaps we could call home.


This is a bad TELL. Don’t let us know there is more horrors. Let us discover them as the narrator does.

Don’t tell us that people made a life here. SHOW us that they did.

> the scene was a thousand times more unsettling than before

This almost made me puke. This is terrible. DO NOT SAY SOMETHING WAS 1000X MORE UNSETTLING. Show us this. It is that simple. SHOW us why it was unsettling. Describe the scene, and let us revel in the quiet horror that you paint.

> I understood then that he was never a coward, but that he simply could not bear the sight of more death. Ironically, his exile brought him in contact with more death than we ever saw at home.


A thousand times NO. You CANNOT tell someone the point of the story. You MUST trust your reader to figure it out. If you do, then your ending will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

At other times, you use ineffective language:

> and cities buzzed like beehives,

This really tells us nothing. It really doesn’t. HOW do they buzz? What are the people doing (or what does the narrator imagine they are doing) that they are buzzing?

OK, on the whole there is middling-to-bad prose, with moments of just absolute mind-boggling brilliance. If you can practice your prose and get it all up the point of the first 4 paragraphs, you will dazzle all those who read your stuff.

You are a LONG-ASS way from this. But the fact is that you can do it. You have done it. You just need to train your writing so that you do it all the time.

So, get to it.

WORLD BUILDING/CONSISTENCY

There are a LOT of problems here. You don’t really lay out a accurate view of the black death. You have the characters describe artifacts that they have never encountered – using words that are commonly used by people familiar with these artifacts. You have them know things about the world they cannot (e.g. like which houses are better built, when they have never seen houses like it).

This is a major problem – but it is an EASY problem to solve

First, decide when you think this occurred. THEN, read a 2-6 books each on the periods of time – both in the Americas and Europe. This will give you a sense of what is reasonable to expect in the Europe setting and what the native Americans would be used to seeing (and not seeing).

If you want to go for the middle ages, I suggest the following (for Europe): The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. I have no good suggestions for the Americas.

Again, as written the world you have is not good enough to be credible, but this is readily solved via some research.

So, get to it.

CONCLUSIONS

I don’t say this often (ever?). You have the beginnings of an amazing story. Your strongest asset is your moments of amazing prose, and the fact that you have already established compelling characters with so little. If you expand this, while maintaining what is good and correcting what is bad, you will have quite a story. But there is much work to be done. You need a more fleshed out plot. You need more -- and more active -- characters, and you need a more believable story. NONE of these are problems that cannot be solved.

So…Get to it. :)

Congratulations! I know what a big step that is, as I've been in the same boat. Books are the best way to become informed. Check out books by:

• Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great & The Portable Atheist
  
  
• Stephen Hawking - The Grand Design & A Briefer History of Time
  
  
• Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
  
  
• Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World
  
  
• Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape & The End of Faith
  
  
• Richard Panek - The 4 Percent Universe
  
  
• Robert Ingersoll - Some Mistakes of Moses
  
  
• Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
  
  
• Sean Caroll - The Making of the Fittest
  
  
• Spencer Wells - Deep Ancestry
  
  
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel
  
  
• Alan Watts - The Way of Zen
  
  Also check out the video series Why I am no longer a creationist.
  
  The more you know, the more confident you will be.

The Year 1000 - I read this book in my History of England class back in college. It's one of the few books assigned I actually read cover to cover. It's small, easy to read, and packed with interesting info.

We also read The Virgin Queen by Christopher Hibbert, that was a pretty good non-fiction book on Elizabeth I that reads more like a novel.

Actually, yes.

One of my favorite history-related books is The Cursades Through Arab Eyes which has had some rather anti-West summaries written about it in the past, but upon reading it, you find that those were most likely written by people trying to force their own biases onto it. So, while going by a summary might be good enough for deciding to read it or not for personal reasons, I really don't think it is good enough for judging, voting, or the like. (For the record, I'd really have no interest in reading it from the summary, and I'd write it off as drivel out of hand... but that's my reading choice.)

Many people here have suggested books on military tactics and warfare, and that's certainly a great place to start.

However, something that is oft-forgotten in fantasy warfare is the political elements of war. Because it's not enough that lands be conquered, they must also be kept.

A good place to start is Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince. It gives you a decent primer on the political landscape facing rulers, and the challenges faced in winning, losing, and keeping power.

However, from there you'll want to go for examples, and from there the best place is history. Most importantly, examples of history that tell the story of warfare, from beginning to end, so you can get a true sense of the purpose behind the conflicts. Here are a few examples that have been hugely influential in my own writings:

• Marc Morris' A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain - This one is about King Edward 'Longshanks' I, of Braveheart fame. He spent much of his reign at war, notably bringing Scotland and Wales under England's thumb. However, what this book does best is illustrate how war was only a single component of those conquests, with legal and political machinations making up the balance.
  
  
• Thomas Asbridge's The Crusades. This is one of my favourites. A truly epic telling of the Crusades that really gives you a feel for the players involved in the battles. One thing it really drove home for me was just how factitious and unstable the muslim caliphate was at the time. When we read about an "Empire" in books you think of massive, world-spanning governed by rulers who are practically gods. What you don't think of are religious figureheads ruling over a sea of feuding warlords whose conquests rarely persist beyond the death of their conqueror. For more on this, see The Crusade Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf.
  
  
• And finally, pretty much anything by Tom Holland. His books ramble, and his love for atrociously complex sentence structure is maddening at times, but he weaves history into tales that makes it readily apparent where many of the fantasy greats got their inspiration. Millenium is one I'm working on right now, which is rich in the Christian mythology that it's now obvious to me was the foundation for The Wheel of Time. He also wrote Rubicon, which I own but haven't really gotten to yet.

"The Thirty Years War" by Peter H. Wilson.

I try to read at least one history book a month, although it's often slow going. This one is pretty dry even by those standards but the political ministrations are quite interesting. I would probably not suggest it to the casual reader. A good place to start for those interested in history is probably "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans.

> Think of a medieval market where people met at a specific place at a specific time to directly exchange goods

they didn't. They used coins. Minted in silver, roughly 230 pennies to the pound.

>Is this a market?

Yes because they had buyers, sellers, and price tags.

>Is a system of semi-formal gift exchange a market in some sense?

no, it's a gift exchange. Push, not pull. In general:

give someone a gift, you're typically not obligated to reciprocate.

In a white elephant multi-person rotation exchange, everyone must throw one gift into the pot in order to participate. No this isn't a market.

>I think your definition is perfectly reasonable btw, it just seems more like a personal rubric.

It is; that's why I'm trying to see who can poke holes on it. I got it from a Science Paper involving non-humans (mice). So it's an objective standpoint for something not familiar with those price tags (mice).

I feel the urge to post this link anytime a conversation gets to this point: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

You are of course right in everything you say, the only point I have to diverge with you on is I am one of those damned optimists. My rose hued view of it is just as you say, we manage to stage a fair enough election to take back congress this fall, and then yes, the system works as it was always intended to work at that point. We impeach him, and who gives a fuck if he wants to leave or not at that point? He HAS to leave, it is required of him the minute he is impeached, if he refuses he can fully legally be dragged form the White House in shackles at that point.

I guess I just have faith that even Trump's apparently utterly insane base, will at the moment we are about to go over the presipice, wake the fuck up and open their eyes. Keep in mind, we don't need all of the, not even a majority of them (We are already 63% of the adults here and they are 36%)...we are never going to convince the cultists to leave their dear leader. But if we an get even a small number of the remaining sane Trump supporters over to our side, the numbers being to tip too precipitously in our favor at that point I think.

You have to keep in mind, that even though the internet and social media got us into this damn mess, they also serve as an odd safety trip wire against authoritarianism. There is no way to effectively hide reality from a large enough segment of the population when every person in the country has the internet in their pocket. We will be able to keep an eye on things far more closely than any citizenry that dealt with an attempted hostile overthrow of their representative system of government in the past. This give us in my opinion a very unique and profound advantage in all of this. Our resistance is vastly easier to organize and inform than any previous one throughout history...

Basically, despite much evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic that the people of this country are beginning to awake form their long slumber, and that enough of us will wake up in time to prevent the car going completely over the edge of the cliff...please forgive my mixing of analogies lol, I hope you were able to catch the drift of it at least.

Here's a great book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693/

The answer is, YES, the ethnic and political situation of the United States is very different than the Prussian Empire, which led to Germany, which led to WW1, which led to issues post WW1, and ultimately the nazification of germany, and ultimately the capture of power within that party.

Not saying the US isn't in a risky situation at all, but yes, there are pretty marked differences now compared to Germany over this time period.

People don't really understand the power of intellectuals and their ideas. And that is because radical, new ideas act slowly, usually over a generation or two. People begin to accept a new paradigm without understanding where it came from because it rises so slowly to the surface of political or cultural debate.

Americans scoff at the idea that Trotsky is the seminal influence over neoconservatism because they do not understand that all movements that appear spontaneous sprout from an intellectual seed.

There is a fascinating book on the political, philosophical, literary and artistic history of the western world from the Renaissance until today that proves this point over and over. It is well worth reading "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present" by Jacques Barzun

:-) Ah, another book for my wish list! [I'm for almost anything the Catholic church is against...!] Thank you!

If you don't already have it, another book to recommend: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age, by William Manchester.

https://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545562/

It's been about fifteen years since I read it; it's worth a re-read by now. I remember appreciating it greatly because it was interesting enough to read almost all of it at one sitting.

Probably a lot more detail than you're asking for, but this is a great, easy to read book on what medieval europe was actually like to live in.

Dan Carlin is so fun to listen to. If you enjoyed Blueprint for Armageddon make sure to pick up "Wrath of the Khans," about the rise and zenith of the Mongol Empire. You can listen to it 4 times through and still hear new things on every listen... trust me haha.

Also, if you're interested in WW1 literature, this is required reading: https://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403

It sounds like you had formal education with multiple years studying the language. Everything worth achieving takes time and effort. You have put in a ton of 'mental reps.'

Good for you. Don't discount your achievements. I tell my daughters the same thing, just because you can do something or know something doesn't mean it easy and it doesn't mean that someone who cannot do it or doesn't know it is lesser or put in less effort. It is easy for you (now), because you have mastered or are on your way to mastering it.

There are native speakers who don't understand or properly use the subjunctive. That doesn't even get into the whole argument that helping verbs aren't necessary and appear to be slowly falling out of use.

If you are interested, and it sounds as though you might be the type of person who would be, a great read is https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

I have a couple of books about big game hunters on my list, but I have not read either of these yet:

• Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett, memoirs of a big game hunter in India in the early 20th century.
  
  
• The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant, about hunting a killer tiger in remote Russia.
  
  As for explorers, the best non-fiction I've read about explorers are The Lost City of Z by David Grann, about Percy Fawcett's attempts to find Eldorado in the jungles of South America, and Endurance by Alfred Lansing, about Shackleton's survival after his doomed polar expedition.
  
  It occurs to me that none of these are set in Africa. Hope that's not a deal-breaker.
  
  I'll also recommend my favorite memoir of all time, Papa Hemingway by A.E. Hotchner. It's about his time spent traveling with Ernest Hemingway, who was something of a hunter and adventurer, and recounts a lot of very exciting trips to exotic locales in which manly deeds were done.

Barbra Tuchman's The Guns of August is a personal favorite of mine. Her A Distant Mirror is also supposed to be very good, though I haven't managed to get to it yet.

Carl Sagan is also a great choice if you are interested in space.

That's a really interesting question. You might want to take this to /r/linguistics. The change seems to have occurred when Old English (spoken c. 500AD-1100AD) formed out of Proto-Germanic (spoken c. 500BC-500AD).

In Proto-Germanic, the sentences would've been something like this (obviously, I'm not translating everything, just giving you a rough idea):

• This is *es car, ask *immai. (Two different words)
  
  
• This is *ezōz car, ask *ezōi. (Two different words)
  
  In Old English, they would've looked like this:
  
  
• This is his car, ask him. (Two different words)
  
  
• This is hire car, ask hire. (Same word)
  
  Why, I'm not sure. We may not even know - change just happens in languages, sometimes for no reason at all. However, we do know that, the farther back you go in English's history, back through Old English and Proto-Germanic, all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, you can see that noun cases have been dropping like flies. We used to have a very complex system of cases, and now we only have remnants of that (his/him, I/me, etc). You might be interested in reading Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter, which goes into some hypotheses as to why English has simplified so much.

Thank you for this answer! This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for!

Yesterday, while still mulling it over, I actually was able dig up the name of a French historian named Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie who has written about Middle Age French peasants from surviving records. In the index of his books "The Peasants of Languedoc" and "Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error", the peasants almost all seem to have fixed family names. The first book covers the period of 1500 to 1750 and the second book covers 1294 to 1324, which reaches the same conclusion you did, i.e. that French peasants were using fixed last names by the end of the 13th Century.

As for some of the peasants having two different last names, the Wikipedia page on the name of Joan of Arc sheds some light. So even as late as the 15th Century, surnames in France weren't strictly hereditary, but it seems that many if not most such surnames had certainly begun to "stick" with the lower classes sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries.

Thanks again for your help!

It's just you. Hobb's Elderlings series was first published in 1995. GRRM's ASOIAF was started in 1991, and there are many accounts/interviews that document GRRM's inspirations and overall vision he planned from the beginning.

GRRM's website FAQ also lists a number of book titles he used for research. I've read some of them, and the specific influences are not hard to pick up on. For example, A Distant Mirror describes a family that grew to importance because they built up their main keep at a major river crossing and controlled all traffic through it, just like House Frey.

Additionally, themes of mental connections with fantasy animals, people riding dragons they are connected to, etc. are all old tropes. An easy example is McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series that was first published in 1967.

EDIT: Also you may want to fix the references to "worgs" in your article; you have them down as "wogs."

Evans is one of the most eminent living historians on the subject of Nazi Germany, having dedicated his entire career to researching it.

He and many others, the majority of actual historians, agree that the circumstances and methods in which the Nazis rose to power had little to do with actual democracy. Just because a bunch of people voted doesn't mean it was actually democratic, or adhering to the democratic structure of Germany at the time.


You are the one who is challenging that.

"The slide away from from parliamentary democracy into an authoritarian state ruling without the full and equal participation of the parties or the legislatures"

"Political power had seeped away from the legitimate organs of the constitution onto the streets at one end, and into the small cabal of politicians surrounding President Hindenburg at the other, leaving the vaccuum in the vast area between, where normal democratic politics take place. "

What part of that is 'democratic'? Without the full and equal participation of the parties or the legislatures. How can we call that 'democratic'?


The circumstances regarding the Nazi rise to power are complex, but people like to go "hurr, democratically elected" because that's an easy answer, when the reality is complex and doesn't yield an easy answer. You're the one here putting your fingers in your ears and going "LA LA LA DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU".


Read a book, man. Start with this one

I really enjoyed my reading of "A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0553382403/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_Eh21AbS0PCY5A
Covers all aspects and "fronts" in a very interesting way. I highly recommend it. I was in the same place you were now and this was my first book in my journey (I've since read about a dozen books on the war, and I keep wanting more!) Hope you find your book of choice and enjoy the topic as much as I have!

Just to comment on the book, Man-eaters of Kumaon is a fascinating read. I have read it dozens of times and as I grow older, I find different parts of his story that fascinate me. Check it out if you can. Good adventure reading.

absolutely. language is constantly evolving and rules are determined purely by consensus.

I'm particularly interested in a quirk of english where you end a sentence in "that" or "they".

e.g. "trolls... solitary creatures, they"
or
"fucking interesting, that."

no clue what you'd call it but I bet that syntax has an interesting history.

also check out this book. we get a lot of fun quirks of english compared to other germanic language because of the Celts
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

Reminds me of this classic that read when I was younger: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Eaters-Kumaon-Oxford-India-Paperbacks/dp/0195622553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496909025&sr=8-1&keywords=maneaters+of+kumaon

Awesome book of stories about one man's experiences with these magnificent, intelligent and vengeful creatures.

Here's the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-The-Fateful-Siege-1942-1943/dp/0140284583

I'd highly recommend it. Definitely accessible for a non-historian (such as me). It was just amazing how the Soviets recovered from almost losing Moscow. The Germans continually thought the Soviets were on their last legs, just one more push before they'd collapse - but it never happened, and the Soviets kept forming up division after division, manufacturing tank after tank, way beyond what Germany thought they were capable of doing.

Now I'd like to find a good book about the aftermath - the gradual multi-year fighting retreat Westwards of the German army until the end.

History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer. I'm reading this now and I've really enjoyed it, very clear writing and introductory overviews to cultures all over the world - Europe, North Africa, China, Korea, India, you name it.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman. This one was highly recommended on /r/medievalhistory

The German Wehrmacht did use flame throwers. And they were very effective during WWII. However flame thrower operators were always high priority targets and therefore were offered bonuses. For reference please read Anthony Beevor's book Stalingrad.

https://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Fateful-1942-1943-Antony-Beevor/dp/0140284583

Also the US Marine Corps while fighting the Japanese loved using flame throwers against bunkers.

The difficulty of discussing Christianity and the Holocaust, directly, is that relatively few people, even within Germany, were truly aware of the extent of the Holocaust until near the end of the war. As a result, you will find it a little more difficult to find information directly related to that topic. Christianity's relationship to Naziism, on the other hand, does have some more readily available information.

While a good portion of Germany's Christian population either supported, or at least failed to oppose, Naziism, that is not universally the case. You might be interested in a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian who strongly opposed Hitler and Naziism, and was eventually executed by them. He was moderately known at the time, but became extremely influential in the past few decades or so.

While it's an extremely large volume, and not directly related, you might find some useful information in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". It's very comprehensive, and does talk a bit about the Christian Democrat party's opposition to Nazism early on, only to eventually fail to mount any meaningful opposition as Hitler began rising to power.

Finally, while I don't know of any specific books on the topic, you probably will want to look into the influence of Martin Luther (specifically his antisemitism) on Germany, Naziism, and Hitler. This is topic that has been widely written about, to my knowledge, so there should be an abundance of information out there on it.

Sometimes, an in-depth case study of a specific person/event can reveal larger truths about the period being studied.

Probably my favorite history book ever, A Distant Mirror, is framed as a biography of a relatively unimportant French noble from the period for precisely this reason.

In other cases, historians are forced to take this approach because the surviving writing from a period is mostly about the smaller subject. The reason so many studies of Norman England are about land ownership isn't because it's necessarily the best way to understand the time period, it's because we happen to know way more about land ownership from the time period than we do about anything else. I'm not sure this is true of, say, Dutch local political parties from the interwar period, but it wouldn't surprise me if whoever wrote that paper had an exceptionally good group of documents on them. The fact that a paper might attract a small or specialized readership shouldn't diminish its scholarly importance.

EDIT: bad grammar corrected

I come from no expertise on the subject (besides a college course on Europe in the High Middle Ages) but I picked up Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and found it to be a fascinating read. ]

The author mostly draws from Arab chronicles to build an idea of how contemporary Arabs viewed the events of Crusades. Overall it was refreshing to read about one of the most controversial events in European Medieval history in a book that was almost completely derived from the Arab historiography. By not focusing on European sources and interpretations of the events, it was really interesting seeing the crusaders as this looming alien threat within the Muslim world.

That perspective made it all the more interesting to see how difficult it was for the Arab world to unite against what appeared to be a common threat, and how that political fragmentation allowed for alien European-Christian Kingdoms to exist within the Arab world for so long. Ultimately it was great read for a great vacation!

>The Nazis were pretty explicit about their intent.

Not actually true, really. Yes, Hitler and the NSDAP were explicit about their intent in the early 1920s, when they were getting 2% of the vote at most (I think in the 1928 elections they got something like 0.7% of the vote, if memory serves).

Then, once the Depression started and things were going from bad to worse, Hitler saw his political moment and he actually toned down his anti-Semitism and political extremism, toned down his attacks on capitalism and became more friendly to big business in much the same way the British Labour Party would in the later 1940s.

When one-third of the German people voted for Hitler in 1933, they were voting for a party which played to long-held German beliefs and prejudices (including anti-Semitism) about the need for a strongman like Otto von Bismarck rather than feeble parliamentary democracy, a party which appealed to Social Democratic notions of strong trade unions and welfare for the old and the poor and war veterans and a basic standard of living for all, a party which talked about reining in the excesses of exploitative (read: Jewish) capitalism, a party which appealed to the nostalgia of "the good old days" before 1914, a party which would stave off a Bolshevik Revolution (the threat of which was very real and which was, after widely disseminated reports of Trotsky's Red Terror in the early 1920s, widely reviled), a party which would throw off the shackles of Versailles and put Germany back in the top tier of nations which Germany's economy and kultur deserved, and, most of all, a party which promised an end to the political deadlock of the Weimar Republic--which was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of practically all Germans.

But what's astonishing is just how vague Hitler and the NSDAP were about all this. Like any politician, they spoke in platitudes and phrases which were open ended in their interpretation. When Hitler spoke of smashing Jewish finance, moderates heard him saying that international bankers were strangling Germany economically after WWI and needed to be reined in with reasonable regulation; the hardcore anti-Semites heard Hitler talking about expropriating Jewish banks outright.

Far from voting for an party which explicitly promised another world war and death camps filled with Jews, Germans thought they were voting to "Make Germany Great Again" by returning to a kind of Kaiserreich where a strong leader, aided by a loyal, dispassionate, efficient civil service carrying out the Leader's every order without being tangled up in messy parliamentary politics, would make ordinary Germans richer and esteemed in the eyes of the world. And more than some voted for the NSDAP to "keep those Jews in their place."

That's not my opinion, but rather the opinion of eminent historian Richard J. Evans.

Enguerrand I, Lord of Coucy

I have been reading "A Distant Mirror" an amazing book about medieval history, and decided to play as , the first royal ancestor of the main character in the book.

To play him the start date has to be January 1, 1077, and choose the County of Amiens in the Kingdom of France.

Me and my friend have had a back and forth succession game as his line and it has been a blast. You are constantly caught in the middle of France exploding into revolutions, the English, Flemish, and HRE, among others, all trying to encroach on your position. It is a constant defensive battle, but very rewarding when you manage to snag an extra county or two.

I need to raise a point of contention. I think it is wrong to judge impratiality based on whether one is a Muslim or a non-Muslim. The truth is everyone has certain biases and works within their own framework.

Muslim scholars, for most part, have the Islamic bias i.e. they start with the presumption that the claims made by Islam are true.

On the other hand, non-Muslim scholars of Islam come in a wide range of biases, backgrounds and conclusions. I noticed that the ones you mentioned (Esposito, Armstrong, Watt) are those within the traditionalist framework. Reading their work is as good as reading the works of Muslim scholars as they stick closely to the traditional Islamic narrative.

For a more critical or skeptical approach to Islam, I would recommend the following authors, Stephen J Shoemaker, Robert Hoyland and Gabriel Reynolds. For a summarized work, written for lay people, I would recommend Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

P.S. This article might be a good introduction - http://research-islam.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-revisionist-history-of-islams.html

Very nice work!

This reminds me very much of the book In the shadown of the sword by Tom Holland. Which in my opinion is an excellent read!

Perhaps I buy the pdf and otherwise the paperback. Good work!

Agree. It was a terrifying time, and is still I presume for people that share space with these tigers. There's a wonderful documentary out there about how people have adapted to living with tigers in the mangroves (sunderbans)

For folks that enjoy reading, there are fantastic books about man-eating tigers. Man-eaters of Kumaon. See related items for others at this link

I remember reading this in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Fantastic book with so much info about Hitler and the Third Reich. Definitely recommend it for history junkies.

It's 1280 pages.


Edit: if anyone is interested here is a link to buy The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Love the costumes. All that armor! I doubt every part of it as being historically accurate, but it is such fun to watch. I really need to give A World Lit Only By Fire a reread. I remember it being a good sum up of this time period, but it has been a few years.

A couple that I've read from Antony Beevor:

Stalingrad, and its follow up book The Fall of Berlin 1945. Beevor has also written books on the Ardennes, D-Day, and an all encompassing book on WWII. I have yet to read those but can attest that his two Eastern Front focused books are fantastic

I would also highly recommend The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury. Absolutely haunting stuff.

> These ten men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers. Nobody ever gave them a free sample of anything on the ground that what they thought of it would increase the sales of the product. Their importance lay in the fact that God—as Lincoln said of the common people—had made so many of them. In a nation of seventy million, they were the sixty-nine million plus. They were the Nazis, the little men to whom, if ever they voiced their own views outside their own circles, bigger men politely pretended to listen without ever asking them to elaborate.

~ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Some great history books:

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   
   
2. Stalingrad
   
   
3. The Interrogators
   
   
4. On Roads
   
   The first and last are not military history but are quite a good and different reads for someone interested in history and facts.

Read, read, and read some more.

A decent popularly-accessible book on life in the later "dark ages" would be The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey. He addresses everything from daily life, to the agricultural cycle, to health and medicine all in a short and easy read.

Now that's for England in the late 10th century. The fads, superstitions, and culture would be different in, say, southern France or Silesia.


As for a little theory-crafting:
Your house would be a single room, made of a timber frame and walled with wattle-and-daub. The thatch making up the roof would be replaced every couple years or so (a more efficient way of doing this wouldn't be invented until the 14th century), and the floor of bare earth covered with a thick layer of rushes that were swept out and replaced periodically.

You wake up at dawn lying on the floor. You have no bed to speak of, but the rushes are comparably soft and warm, and your woolen blanket soft and comfortable. You complain to your wife that it might be time to change the fleabane hanging from the walls, as you think a couple might have gotten in to your blankets. She rolls her eyes at your grousing and prods at the small fire in the center of the single room. The smoke rises to the rafters and slowly leaks out through a vent on one side.

Your children rise groggily and rub their eyes as you wash your face, arms, hands, and chest with water from a pottery basin and ewer. You change your linen undershirt and briaes (sort of like loose boxer shorts) and pull on your long, woolen tunic. You've had it for a long time, and the once more vibrant orange-red color, dyed with madder, has begun to fade.

You instruct your middle child to empty the chamber pots while you head outside to relieve yourself. After you finish, you give your younger children their final reprimands to do their chores, feel the forehead of your youngest and fret she's feeling feverish, fetch your single ox, kiss your wife, and head for the fields. Your eldest son accompanies you. Though he is still young, he will be assigned to keep the birds away from the freshly-planted seed with stones and sticks.

It's early spring, and that means plowing. You meet with the other men of the manner and work together to plow your fields. you have been assigned a couple narrow strips in a couple different fields, as has everyone else. Whatever you can grow in these furrows is yours. In addition to your own land, you and your neighbors also work the land of your lord. It's a two-way relationship--you work his land and he lays on feasts and provides certain resources. If times are hard, he's required to feed you. Last year, the harvest was bad and several freemen from the surrounding came to your lord and voluntarily submitted themselves to him in exchange for food. They now number amongst your neighbors.

You work all morning with the other men plowing long, narrow furrows into the earth and scattering seeds for the yearly crop of wheat or barley. You break at midday for your first meal of the day, a thick pottage of long-boiled vegetables thickened with barley and edible greens. You drink a weak ale or water (you're away from the cities--the water is as clean as it gets).

You work all afternoon, chatting and gossiping with the others. Your wife is at home grinding wheat and barley, tending the fire, cooking your meal, spinning wool into yarn, gathering vegetables from the fields surrounding, and wash the family's linen undergarments. Your children help to their abilities, take care of the animals, fetch water, and play.

In the evening, your chat, play, sing, eat, drink, and pray. When night falls, you strip off your woolen outer layers, maybe change to fresh linens, and curl up in your blankets next to your wife on the floor. Tomorrow is a Sunday, and that means church. The next day is a feast day, and that also means church, as well as some merryment with your neighbors.

You grow different crops at different times of year. You have all sorts of superstitions about how to get the best crop yields, how to stay healthy, how to avoid trouble--some work; some don't. Religion is not really something you even think about--it's just a part of daily life. You've never in your entire life met anyone with beliefs other than that of "christian," though you've heard tell of lands beyond.

If you get sick, there are prayers and home remedies a plenty. You're too poor to afford one of the school-trained doctors, of which there are a few, who study the old Greek and Roman arts of medicine.

If you're badly injured, there are amputations, trepanning, and setting of broken bones.

If we're in England, in times of trouble, you would not be called up to fight in the Fyrd (closest modern term would be "militia"). That was for the freemen. If you were a freeman, you would be required to own a shield and spear and to turn up with both plus personal provisions when your lord orders, or pay a hefty fine.

If you are wronged, justice was local, with the community taking care of most of the judgement and the lord acting as arbiter if necessary. The Saxon-era English had a rather ingenious system of fines for various offences, including set rates for loss or damage of body parts (teeth included).

A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman

Words don't do it justice. One of the reviews was "real life Game of Thrones" and while it's somewhat trite, it's also true. The subject is an example of the best of the medieval era, and his life touched on many events that shaped western history.

One warning, it's probably going to be a tough nut for a 15 year old to crack. It's accessible as a narrative, but you should expect to have to wiki things, look at maps, and use supporting material to explain the basics.

For a less intense look, one of the "Life in" books by Joseph Gies and Frances Gies (Life in a Medieval City, LIA Medieval Castle, LIA Medieval Village), is a look at the everyday in that time. Medieval Village is the best one to start with. Rather than the names and dates of "big history", they are the traditions, customs, and anecdotes of everyday life, based on specific examples in specific time periods.

I don't see a 15 year old having trouble going through them. They are written plainly and attempt to explain the backdrop of history that those places are in. Additional material will be minimal beyond wikipedia.

I'm not homeschooling, but I'm certainly going to expose my children to these books when they're old enough.

There's a really excellent (and sort of scary) book about this called "They Thought They Were Free". The author went back to Germany, and interviewed "regular joe" type people that were alive during Hitler's rise to power. When asked how they let it happen, they all said that they thought Hitler had their best interests in mind and was protecting them from all kinds of threats.

A quote from Sinclair Lewis comes to mind: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

There's an awesome book out I learned about today called "They Thought They Were Free" (http://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928) about the perception everyday Germans had during World War II. Most were aware SOMEthing was wrong, but they were all mutually benefitting from whatever it was, so chose, some unconsciously to not say or do anything. Fascinating book. I'm about 3/4 through.

Thanks for the info! Linguistics is fascinating to me. Especially since you used the word bastard to describe English, I'm reminded of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter. It's one of my favorite books and it does try to explain why the impact of other languages was seemingly higher on English. It's very entertaining too and not just "...for a linguistics book".

That sounds awesome! I'm currently building a world for a book. And something like this seems super helpful. Do you think it's the same as this one, even though the cover isn't quite the same? https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

I don't want to top post since you've pretty much answered this. I'd like to add a book suggestion on the topic for OP or any others who would like to better understand what you're describing. It's cheap, and explains things quite well. I'm halfway through it myself.

> they do it in small enough increments that nobody notices while it's happening..

In "They Thought They Were Free", Milton Mayer returned to Germany and interviewed Germans to try to determine how they had let Hitler come to power. One of them remarks:

> "What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.

> "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

> "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

German here. It seems to me like too many people are pinning their hopes on this one investigation.

Too many people are still sure that the system works at some level, even though Trump and his cronies have been busy dismantling it from the inside right since he got into office. They're sure that the institutions will still protect them. They're sure that the population is generally aware of what's going. They're sure that if Trump ever took that final step into authoritarianism, millions would be in the streets.

So I'm just here to say that this process has happened before, and it has happened in many countries, and all of the arguments you're making have been made before - and yet many of these countries fell to totalitarianism.

I'm just gonna leave this quote from a German university professor who was interviewed about what life in Germany was like in 1933-45:

>"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

>"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all."

(source: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45)

For kids that age. Not just girls.

I read these.

• Enid Blyton
  
• Roald Dahl (Famous Five, etc)
  
• Harry Potter series
  
• The secrets of Droon series
  
• Goosebumps series
  
  many more that I can't remember the names of
  
  Super relatable Indian ones
  
  
• Jim Corbett my favourite one
  
• Ruskin Bond a good collection of stories like this
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

For anybody interested in learning more about almost everything being discussed in this thread, I highly recommend reading The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. Dr. Carroll is not only a leader in the field of Evo-Devo, he is an excellent writer, making some of the most difficult concepts of the molecular aspects of evolution easy to understand.

do yourself a favor and read "A World Undone"

this book is an amazing look at ww1 and the individuals that drove the war... I studied WW1 in college (history major) and this book stands out as one of my all time favorites.

its arguable. The basic rule I would advise people is that if you can spell it logically it is latin based. If you can't spell it logically its german. If the verb changes tense in the middle of the word, then its of semetic origin, as all germanic strong verbs are.

If you are curious please see:

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412209131&sr=8-1&keywords=our+glorious+bastard+tongue

The book will actually make you laugh. Well written.

For the medieval period, I found The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England very interesting. Definitely more of a popular book than hard-core history, though.

This book and it's series of books will tell you most you want to know, from what colors you couldn't wear or what kind of birds you were not allowed to eat. Great detail and fun read.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

IMHO, here's a very good place to start learning about the European history of WW2. Get yourself to a Library, or better yet, just buy the book. It's a good, in depth look at what happened and how it happened.

I read "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes" in College, that was a pretty good book. I can also recommend: "Muhammad, a prophet of our time" I read this also in college.

The Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor is an amazing book.

Also Stalingrad The Fateful Seige by Beevor is great too.

A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester was incredible. It was like he took my AP European history class, and made it interesting. A wonderful account of how we stumbled upon the renaissance.

How cool! Perhaps i'll have to use reddit as a "free stuff!" place in the future. Especially since I have two copies of the same book, though it was over-zealous Half-Price book-ing. Bought one while in Austin, read another book first, while visiting family in Ft Worth, bought it again because it was a bargain book and I thought I'd never bought it. Oops.

(It's this book )

Meh, over in the Americas, that was the term that we gave to Scottish immigrants at the time, and it stuck. You should note in that contemporary language in the UK at the time, Scotch was a perfectly acceptable adjective to apply to either the drink or the person. Also, at that time Scotch itself was not a popular drink amongst non-scottish folks.

If you're interested in Scottish history, I would recommend Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World:
http://www.amazon.ca/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

I finally have time to upload a bunch of pictures from Paris's Musee d'armee.

For some reason, the camera took terrible pictures indoors. Suffice to say, I got a new camera after this trip.

I studied history in college and found this book to be the best resource on WW1.. A World Undone by GJ Meyer. Easy to read and isn't dull like some history books can be.

The best book I've ever read about medieval Europe is Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. It's a bit dense but you don't have to be a history scholar to enjoy it by any means. It really seemed to cover the whole breadth of medieval society and the political powers and figures at work. It was engaging enough that I wanted to start over at the beginning once I reached the end! Can't say that about any other nonfiction book I've read.

If you'd like to read a well-researched, balanced, and truly terrifying combo of journalism and epidemiology, you could do worse than The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.

I was told by a historian that Jonathan Riley-Smith is one of the leading academics on the Crusades.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Crusades-History-Jonathan-Riley-Smith/dp/0300101287

Just as interesting and, from what I've been told, respected (to me, even more interesting, since the Arabs tend to be real drama-queens and the book seems to enforce that)

http://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Through-Arab-Eyes-Essentials/dp/0805208984

You really are ignorant. It's more about the mindset of people that would allow concentration camps to happen. The devotion to the dear leader over the country. Sure you can easily dismiss it now but once you are over the cliff it is a lot harder to climb out. The average German citizen wasn't aware of the concentration camps or many of the atrocities committed.

That's why the quote by Edmund Burke is so poignant.
> The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

We the people must stay ever vigilant, if we see something we must speak up it is our duty.
What we have seen so far is not a good indication of things to come but by all means, bury yourself in the sands.

I urge you to watch or read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.


https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEw0RIaYrtE

Since they're paraphrasing it anyways (AND WHY ARE THEY SAYING "FIRELIGHT"), here's a great source for running a Dark Ages game:

http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545562

It's not the best history, but it makes for FUN games.

I'm not a scholar so I can only give a short answer: Because Germans were desperate and Hitler turned the country around rapidly.

William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a pretty good source of information on this. He even devotes some time in the book to his incredulity that the Germans easily believed bold faced lies told by the state press.

I really enjoyed The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium

Another good one that comes to mind is London: The Biography

Also, if you're on FB, there are some pretty cool groups for UK history enthusiasts that you might want to join/check out. I bet if you asked this question in one of those groups (I used to be in a couple, but am not on FB anymore) you'd get a lot of feedback.

Any suggestions on how to approach high-level physics without a formal math background?

I am an engineer with an academic concentration in signals processing and a minor in physics, so I do have a strong quantitative background. However, my training was heavily slanted towards ad-hoc problem solving rather than rigorous analysis, so I find myself lost as I tackle topics grounded in formal mathematics.

Specifically, I have been reading Lanczos' The Variational Principles of Mechanics, a popular analytical mechanics text, with great difficulty.

Is it worth reading a pure math book on differential geometry or something similar? How do most graduate students study advanced physics, when an undergraduate physics education doesn't use much math beyond basic PDEs?

Actually, I'm not. Let me be very clear that I am not saying that National Socialism and Communism (especially Stalinism) are the same, they aren't. I'm saying that the methods used to implement the two and the rhetoric used was very similar. So similar that Communist academics had to make up these stupid terms like "reactionary" in order to created a division where there wasn't one.

Both the Bulshivek movement in Russia and the Nazi movement in Germany leveraged the "workers" against the aristocracy. Stalin and Hitler (while hating each other bitterly) complimented each other on occasions for doing what they though was correct. Stalin congratulated Hitler on the Night of Long Knives, Hitler praised Stalin's purification of the Communist party from Jewish influence.

Read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich if you really want to understand the methods employed to bring the Nazi's into power. If it doesn't remind you of the way the Bolsheviks came into power then you aren't paying attention.

The impetus for trying to separate the two only stems from people trying to maintain that Communism is a force for good. An argument that I disagree with, but think is not injured by acknowledging that the same rhetoric and revolutionary devices were used in both the Bolshevik and Nazi rises to power.

Edit: A book I'm reading right now does a great job of demonstrating this in a scholarly way. The most jarring thing about the book is how resistant some academics are to allow this comparison. Very much in the vein of your comment. They see the comparison as a threat (something I don't really understand), instead of looking at it as an academic work.

> They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

on amazon.com

and on amazon.ca

love to note the 40% price difference..btw

Along with "The Guns of August" and Keegan's "The First World War," I'd recommend "A World Undone," by G. J. Meyer. It's quite a bit of book, but a great overview.

You might be interested in checking out How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Very good writer there if you like reading history.

I don't know if it is exactly "light reading" but The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich By William Shirer is a really fascinating look at the Nazis and World War II. It's not at all complex like some of the classics you've listed here, but it's still a really enjoyable read.

A World Undone ( http://www.amazon.com/World-Undone-Story-Great-1914/dp/0553382403/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325016559&sr=8-1 ) is a phenomenal one-volume account of WWI. Just enough details to be really interesting, but not so high-level as to be dry. It's well written and very readable. Plus, it includes small, side chapters that help explain the history and historical context of events of the main chapters. It's really a phenomenal read.

Citizens by Simon Schama gives you an in depth view of the entire revolution. Best read after you've mastered the basics of chronology and character though, it's too detailed to be a good intro.

I'll give you two that I've enjoyed lately:

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations talks about some states that you see in Eu4 like Aragon, Burgundy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century takes you into the life of a French nobleman during the Hundred Years War. I'd check out pretty much anything else by Tuchman while you're at it.

I liked this, but it took me a little longer to get because of the reversed order in the middle.

The first sentence has "Jesuits...Dominicans", the last sentence has "Jesuits...Dominicans", so the middle one should be "the Jesuits to fight the Protestants, and the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians."

Side note: A really interesting book I read about the common Cathars in France was Montaillou. Definitely check it out if you're interested in that period.

Read the book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. There's a great audiobook version on Audible. I'm American too, except my four years of history classes were in Texas not NYC, and after reading that book I truly realized how little they actually taught us in high school.

I that case you might be interested in the following books:

• Barbard Tuchman's A distant mirror. The best book on medieval history I think I've ever read.
  
• A time traveller's guide to medieval England by Ian Mortimer
  
• Agincourt by Juliet Barker
  
  

Little known fact.... he actually has a book out... and it's actually really good. Kind of a long read but helps you really understand his life.

Amazon page for it

For anyone interested in this area in the previous century, this book is just great.

Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad was a pretty gripping read about the battle and the fate of the 6th army. I'm sure some of the more hardcore history buffs out there have more detailed suggestions, but if you're looking for a good layman's history of Stalingrad you can't go wrong with it.

University mobilization was extremely important to the Nazis. Student groups grew to the point where the entirety of student unions were controlled by extremist Nazi youth groups. They then moved on the faculty, getting leftists and jews and other undesirables sacked in favor of ideologically similar folks.

This of course doesn't even begin to mention the effort that was put into indoctrinating even younger grade-school students.

Everyone should read Richard Evans' fantastic 3-part series on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Now more than ever do people owe it to themselves to see how this kind of thing starts as a fringe movement and gradually proceeds to....well, everything.

As the poster below said, that's a borrowed word from Old Norse (The Vikings raided England and actually ruled the island for a few years almost a millennium ago. The show Vikings depicts this event.) .

There's actually a good book about the history of English, with a great name. "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue". The tl;dr is in the title: English has a lot of words borrowed from other languages.

https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

As for stuff like "Knight" of "Thought", the "gh" used to be pronounced like the "ch" back of the throat sound in "blech" but it eventually got dropped.

Then there's the famous "Vowel Shift" which changed how basically every vowel was pronounced, which was most likely influenced by the large number of borrowed words in the middle ages.

http://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_early_modern.html

Citizens is a really good account and a really good read. It's not a novel but I still highly recommend it

I loved Witcher 3. You might be interested in this: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

John McWhorter's book has a chapter on it. It's written for a popular audience, and it gives the standard arguments. Personally, I'm not convinced by it, but it's easy to read, that's for sure. A lot of scholarship on this can get quite technical, and it's quite easy to fool those who don't actually know a Brittonic language.

This is a pretty good book ... Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

First witnessed in 1374 - good article here. I remember reading about this years ago, the main suggestion being that it was in the years following the black death which led to an upsurge in religious fervour - also lots of examples of self-flagellation - basically people doing anything they thought would mean God spared them from the plague.

Read it in A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman which is a fantastic read if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Medieval Cities had specialized shops for almost everything. A city with actual walls would have freemen who were chandlers, butchers, leatherworkers, smiths, etc. with their own shops, typically with their family living in the second story of the building.

Market towns (pop a few hundred) are much more likely to have the everything is sold at the market vibe. But usually only twice a week or something. You probably would be entirely unable to find serious armor there.

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368722301&sr=8-1&keywords=time+travelers+guide+to+medieval+england

this book gives you a great background to extrapolate from real history to get a realistic fantasy setting

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686/ref=nodl_

I’ll trust a man who was there at the time over a Yale professor born in 1957. Thanks.

A fantastic book, A Distant Mirror is a detailed glimpse of medieval 1300's French and English life, from royalty to peasantry.

There are some sections in the book that describe mercenary groups, including some interesting bits about groups that don't get paid, and essentially leaderless bands that pillaged 'friendly' countrysides just to survive. Some were as big as standing armies, but without a war to fight, bank to fund them, or often even a purpose just hardend soldiers - and how they roamed pilliaging summer seasons and forcefully occupied random towns for winters .

Surprisingly, not true. Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Linen undergarments were surprisingly good at absorbing sweat and oil, so as long as *those* were clean (changed and washed frequently) people didn't stink like you would expect. Further since the common knowledge at the time was that disease could be caused by 'miasma' or bad air it was important not to stink.

Medieval cleanliness standards were different from today, not nonexistant.

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918 by G.J. Meyer is a really thorough and enjoyable read that definitely covers 'the big picture' in an accessible way.

Yeah... for that perspective I'd highly recommend They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer.

He interviews and forms relationships with around a dozen citizens of a small town in Hesse over the course of a decade or so about their experiences and thoughts during the rise of Nazism and the following years.

>English was Celtic based until it was conquered by the anglosaxons

But wouldn't this still imply it has based on Celtic? I read Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue a while back and he made the strong case that English still has some large Celtic elements. For example the word "do" and its variants have almost no meaning but is an obligatory word in a lot of English sentences. The "meaning less do" is pretty rare and has very few equivalents in the world but one of the other modern day languages that has an equivalent is Welsh.

John McWhorter wrote a really solid book about how all the invasions of England warped and shaped the language called Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. Definitely check it out if you get a chance.

Anyone had any first hand experience with Lancazos' Variational Principles of Mechanics?. I'm almost through Landau's Mechanics and was interested in learning more about the action principle, although I don't have any background in the calculus of variations and such.

Yes, this. The Protestant Work Ethic: idle hands, etc.

Of course the puritans weren't the inventors of such notions. In the Middle Ages, usury (making money out of money, or charging "excessive" interest for loans) was a sin, technology which allowed one person to do more work than another were forbidden. The word curfew ("cover fires") comes from the extinguishing of all lights so that no-one could work after dark to increase productivity. (For most of this I use Barbara W. Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as reference)

Human beings do seem to have an innate distaste for unfairness. We're social creatures, after all. Perhaps the drive that motivates the above, as well as the denigration of work that seems "too easy" is simple jealousy, maybe combined with the fear of being used.

ETA Link to A Distant Mirror on Amazon. It's a great book; y'all history buffs should read it, or some of her other works. A history prof I know regards Tuchman very highly.

Christianity: I've heard that Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch is fantastic. I haven't read it. It's called "Christianity", not "Catholicism", but it might work for you given that Catholicism pretty much was Christianity until (relatively) recently.

French Revolution: Citizens by Simon Schama.

Can't help you with Zoroastrianism.

https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Magic-Ancient-Egypt-Rosalie/dp/0140262520 This book i found to be very interesting when talking about old egyptian history. It gives a look into early society and how they went from scattered communities to a kingdom, but it focuses on the religious aspect.

I would think a book on Napolean would be a good start, and also a book on the French Revolution.
https://www.amazon.com/Napoleon-Life-Andrew-Roberts/dp/0143127853

https://www.amazon.com/Citizens-Chronicle-Revolution-Simon-Schama/dp/0679726101/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TS49J5H345TC8T3XXSS5

Very much enjoyed Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama . Very readable. Was my first foray into reading about the French Rev. so I don't have a lot to compare it to, but it was quite informative and engaging.

I don't know about pictures, but the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson is fantastic and covers US involvement thoroughly.

Also the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Ron Rosenbaum is downright chilling. He actually lived in Nazi Germany.

Probably about as in-depth as you'd need for assassins creed. Also the further reading at the bottom.

But I'm going to go ahead and recommend Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama. His works are very accessible for people who want a good, non-fiction narrative history that also isn't incredibly academic.

Det må være bogen "They Thought They Were Free" om tyskerne i årene 1933 til 1945. Spændende læsning. Men omslaget er et kæmpe kagekors, hvilket gør at jeg er nødt til at gemme bogen af vejen, da den ellers giver for mange kommentarer fra folk, der konkluderer før de undersøger. Bogen kan ses her: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

Edit: Hagekors ikke kagekors...

You may like this book in that case! It's a good read

I recommend the following book on the subject: The Variational Principle Of Mechanics which elaborates on the relationship between the two views much more effectively than I can.

I actually found this one even more enjoyable than Time Traveler’s Guide. The prose is so charming.

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World

Was going to recommend Keegan as well, so at least that's two random internet strangers who agree this would be a good starting point!

There is also Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It may be a bit massive, but it's a damn good read.
https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686

I think by far, the most comprehensive and accessible one volume history on the war is "A World Undone" by GJ Meyer.

Brigadier Sir Richard Holmes' "The Western Front" is a very quick read and very enlightening on aspects of, well, the Western Front. It's focus allows for detail on the main theatre of the conflict, but that focus does take away form the "World' aspect of World War One.

A wonderful, visual account of the war and the aspects surrounding it is found in Stephen Patricia's "And the World Went Dark" which is both informative and a fantastic illustrated history. (Full disclosure, I contributed written copy to this book.)

And I can't resist a little plug for my own work, a novel set on the Western Front in 1917, which, while a work of fiction has a painstaking approach to realism and I've used points in the narrative to take an educational tone so that readers unfamiliar with certain points of the conflict can become immersed in the story. It's only available as an ebook at the moment, "Killing is a Sin"

Did you know Amazon will donate a portion of every purchase if you shop by going to smile.amazon.com instead? Over $50,000,000 has been raised for charity - all you need to do is change the URL!

Here are your smile-ified links:

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

---

^^i'm ^^a ^^friendly bot

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693

This is the first in a Trilogy by Evans. Excellent research, and when ready today, while still very different from the United States, will seem closer than you would like. When he starts explaining about how journalism fractured into political journalism along ideological lines, you can see the same problems we suffer today.

Also, a highlight for the section explaining what happened to Adolf Hitler after the Beerhall Putsch. He talks about the country put him in a deluxe cell, and his probation was no public speaking for five years. They came and went.

I've been re-listening to my Citizens audiobook. A good summary of the French Revolution and the Terror, of which Marat was a guiding hand.

I like this take on the painting because it slyly copies David's Death of Marat from a different angle!

Earlier this week I just finished up Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution & McLynn's Napoleon: A Biography, both of which I highly recommend if you're at all interested in the French Revolution.

When did I do that? Please quote my comment here about socialist and national socialism with Marxism?

They did so seize it. You should read rise and fall of the 3rd Reich.

And also do research on Albert Speer.

You will learn that Fascism is very much a centralized planned economy and stole the means of production.

Motivation is only the why, not the what... and not even the true why most of the time. The actions of each are completely the same and a lot of the rhetoric is as well.

Finally, the fact that you think Pence is anything like 'Muslims' (I'm guess you mean Islamists) on any scale shows me just how distorted your word view is.

Try this: http://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Fateful-1942-1943-Antony-Beevor/dp/0140284583 ... looks like a good book. Appears to discuss disease.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-1000-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

Great book!

Something that certainly shows the rhymes between today and 20th century history worth checking out might be "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

This is a long excerpt (and I'm sure some of you already know it) but I think it's really, really important to read this and think about it:

>"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

>"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

>"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

>"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

>"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

>"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

The guys in the monasteries , but they would have been in Ireland, up near Scotland and on some of the islands.

You would pretty much be looking for the people producing the illuminated manuscripts. The years are off by a bit but take a look at the Iona Monastery and The Book of Kells as starting points

You might also take a look at the pop history book, The Year 1000, by Lacey and Danziger. It focuses on life in England at the turn of the first millennium.



http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-1000-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

Like I said, I find his theory dubious at best. He also suggested that the Grimm's Law shift which changed p to f was also due to Semitic influence, despite the fact that it is in fact a very common sound shift in all sorts of languages, and in fact occurred again in High German languages in the Middle Ages.

In case you were wondering, this is the book I'm referring to http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404495707&sr=1-2&keywords=john+mcwhorter