Recommend books on history

Recommend books on history.
>inb4 start with the greeks

Seconded, was a fascinating read

I recc pic related; the politics make it quite the potboiler, it's got wonderful prose, and it's sprinkled with fascinating contextual asides.

"Is there anyone on earth who is so narrow-minded or uninquisitive that he could fail to want to know how and thanks to what kind of political system almost the entire known world was conquered and brought under a single empire in less than fifty-three years?"
--Polybius, Histories

r/ing more classical history
>in;b4 Mary Beard

whoops

FREEDUMBS

bump

This is a great all-in-one account of a topic that usually doesn't lend itself well to a single book.

I remember getting a bollocking from my professor in 1st year history for relying on it too heavily in an essay.

Churchill's Marlborough and The Black Jacobins by James are my two favorite. Shelby Foote's Civil War is great too.

There is nothing wrong with Mary Beard, she just tried to use her academic acclaim (if you watch a lot of open lectures she is cited all the time by chairs of history departments) to popularize social history, and of course identity obsessed assholes on both sides had a field day. My favorite classical work of history is Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander, of which a brand new landmark just came out.

Also Elaine Pagel's Gnostic Gospels is a fantastic primer on first century christianity, and The Venture of Islam is a fantastic history of the early muslim world.

Oh, and A Distant Mirror, Plagues and Peoples by McNeil, and CV Wedgwood's 30 Years War are great. Also really fun is Tuchman's Distant Mirror and Keegan's Face of Battle.

Thanks senpai