This is really bothering me, Veeky Forums. How are you all so knowledgable about historical events...

You have to have the passion to look up and read primary sources. I don't know as much as a lot of people here, but the majority of what I do know comes from conversation and my own want for details. Its easy for people like us to do in the same way that it's easy for an artist to create a painting, which means that it isn't so easy but we rarely notice the difficulty involved when we flow through it to get our finished product, and it sticks with us in the way that some people can remember every line and detail from a movie.

>nerd butthurt that we're taking over his site
Sorry, loser, but some us have more important stuff to do than read about dead guys

Same. Renaissance Italy was my main interest for the longest time because it was a glorious shit show of political maneuvering and blah blah, but I don't know the first thing about any Arab history that didn't conflict the European history. I know Fuck all about caliphates before the 700's, or even much after, and I'm even worse with oriental dynasties. It never struck a chord with me.

Those dead guys were responsible for the other shit you have to do, so there's that.

And reading about them helps you how?
Lmao go to a party or something geek you'll read when you're old

See, I get into phases with different eras and subjects. I was a hardcore Romaboo for a while, and then I was really into Napoleonic and naval stuff (still am, I'm probably going to end up working on a museum ship this fall if I can help it), my medievalist fiance has put a lot of interest and information towards that (if you want something fun to read, check out the Nibelungenlied--it's basically 12th century Germanic anime), and since a friend showed me the Hamilton soundtrack I listened to it for a week and went on a massive US history binge after wondering just how accurate it was.

The answer being that Aaron Burr is way more of a scumbag than the play would have you think.
Anyway, that's just a sample of the kicks I get into, which can last for months or more.
Lately I've been looking for a good intro to Japanese history to dispel the ninjas and samurai mythology I see everywhere, but haven't been too successful.

I like to go to parties and get drunk and rant about amusing historical anecdotes.

Last time I went out with friends I worked myself to laughing tears talking about German butthurt regarding American shotguns in WWI.

>embarrassing yourself and your friends publicly
Based autismo

Specialise, specialise in something you find interesting, learn a certain period, country, region, peoples, or something inside out

People actually listen to the bullshit, at least. It's pretty easy to tell when someone doesn't care because they'll try to change the subject.

The secret is to get friends who are as nerdy as you.

Look through a university course's syllabus, find an essay question on something you like, and write a paper. An essay is a sure fire way to make sure something sticks in your head.

I still remember pretty much everything about uranium production in Niger from a paper I wrote two years ago.

I sort of do this by texting rants about shit I'm reading to my friends.

If you guys want I can post one about how ridiculous and insane colonial Quakers were.

I've got plenty of stuff to do. I just don't like thick people who have nothing better to do with their time than "take over this site".

In short, bugger off, thicko.

This is the most British thing I've seen today.

I'll take that as a compliment, old chap. :-)

>still mad
Sorry to tell you this virgin but there's nothing you can do about it

It was really just an observation, I'm not the guy half-assedly trolling.

I know, fella. I know. There's nothing on this green and blue Earth I can do about you being not too bright. It's probably best not to boast about it.

It was genuinely taken as a compliment, lad. It made me smile.

Fancy a cup of tea?

>virgin mad he can't get any pussy so he takes his rage out on a chinese imageboard
Very sad!

I study history at Cambridge University. You pick things up

I think I like you, son.

You have perseverance and determination, we'll make a Veeky Forumstorian out of you yet.

One day you will learn the value of using primary and secondary sources to make a water tight argument based on citations rather than this "make things up and defend them" method you have learned from the rest of the chinz.

I have high hopes for you, my boy.

Just specialize on a topic you find interesting. I myself have a bit of a weak point for antiquity, and know quite a bit about it as a result. I've also always been fascinated about Carthage, because it's kind of a lost civilization. I looked up all I could, and I can confidently say I'm an expert on the Punic wars.

>it's a sperg pretends to be an old guy episode
Can you get more autistic?

our historybooks always had a couple of pages with reports and quotes from the time era.

I used to find them boring when i was in school now i thing they were the most interresting part

You're just letting yourself down now.

You know, everyone always jacks off to the second war, but the first is my favorite.

>alright guys, we're in a naval war with a naval power but we don't have a navy
>fuck it, copy their ships and invent a thing to nail the bitches together and we'll just make it a land fight on water

iktf

Most enjoyable to get in contact to close source is prolly to read biographies and memoires

You can also listen do dan Carlin. He might isn't a historian and you might not like his style but he always adds sources to his stories

Btw does anybody know good history podcasts. All i can find are 10 min videos for teenages about things i already knew

One reason everyone seems so knowledgeable is that the collective knowledge of the anons compensate for the individual "deficits". If you were able to chat with anons one at a time, or had this been a forum with accounts, it wouldn't probably feel the same way.

It takes time.
But I don't know what you are talking about anyway, there are a lot of idiots here.

1. Go to library
2. Read books in history section
3. ???
4. Profit

People in general are very interested in history, i'm not the most social adapt person in the world but i just slowly sway conversation to something historical then i'll say a couple interesting facts and people are amused by this and think i'm intelligent (which i really am not)

I'd recommend when doing this that you always check the back for a bibliography, and see what else the author has written. If the bibliography is nice and full and the author tends to stick to one subject, it's probably quality. If there's little to none and the author writes about really eclectic stuff, it's pop history.

Don't bother going to Barnes and Noble for history, go to a used bookstore.

Watch out for books that are older (pre 1940,let's say) since recent discoveries may have discredited them, but also watch out for "reinterpretations" which are often revisionism.

First party sources are best, more so when annotated. Always take army numbers with a grain of salt before the modern period.

The thing is to make sure the thing you're saying is interesting. Nobody cares about Georgian economics, but they do care that George III was fucking insane or that Victorians were so prudish because their parents partied hard.

My favorite way to steer the conversation that way is to initiate a toast or, when one is initiated by someone else, to explain the origins of toasting, i.e. pouring each other's drinks into their cups to dissuade poisoning. People are usually amused by that one.

Exactly, for example i won't go on about how the bureaucratic tax system work in ancient Egypt but I will tell them that about how deeply inbred they all were and that the first ever vibrator was Edyptian and it was a glass jar filled with bees

If you don't care about history, why the fuck are you even here? It doesn't seem like you have anything better to do if looking at a mongolian basket weaving forum about a topic you have no interest in is something you actually devote time to.

Huh. I wonder what the density of bees would have to be to get the optimum vibration intensity. You'd have to give them some room, surely.

Watch real crusades history on youtube. Caliphates are fun.

I know this feel. It's our loss though

>implying dementia won't have set in by the time you finally decide to care

It's better than fiction

You really have to have a passion for it and for reading in general

Honestly I got started off video games ( Dynasty Warriors, Total War ) then moved on to shows and wikipedia

Everything from the 2nd punic, the US civil to the mongol conquests and sino japanese war

It's all fascinating; human psychology never changes

When you read about people like Caesar and Alexander you start to wonder just how easily you yourself could war the crown..

people with knowledge about specific things come here. when threads about their specific subjects appear they post.

>It's better than fiction
This, so much. It's also why I can't enjoy shit like GoT or shows that are "loosely based" on true facts but not entirely.

>tfw reading history made you lose confidence in your fantasy novel

I can't compete with all that

Are you an author? Look I'm not hating on historical fiction, I just find the events that actually happened much more exciting a lot of the time. Partially, because I know they happened and I can trace their effects to this day.

tl;dr read actual fucking books, don't just skim wikipedia and meme it up on khwarezmian pottery forums

recs for reading on Renaissance Italy? I've read the Prince, but other than that I know nothing about the region.

The one I just finished is The History of Rome by Mike Duncan. They're 20-30 minutes eps but there's 170 of them. On my list at the moment is the Historyof Byzantium, history of china, martyrmade and the bristish history podcast.

I started out reading forum debates on history related gaming sites, then participating myself doing my best to keep up by searching down online sources that supported whatever I believed - usually bullshit - and little by little getting better at picking my arguments and fights.

Eventually, to get a better picture of a topic beyond the Wiki summary and blogs, I picked up random pop history books on subjects I found interesting. I used them in debates, which helped me find their shortcomings and biases until I had a better eye for filtering pop history in general.

Soon that wasn't enough. I wanted to know details and big-picture systems that would help take my arguments to the next level as I backed off from general topic shitposting debates in favor of small conversations about little insights or macrohistory. For that I had to move on to reading articles from historical journals or more serious history books from a university press with footnotes out the ass.

Yes pls

god damn

>Aaron Burr
>scumbag

You just don't have the balls to conspire to steal the fucking Louisiana purchase.

Yeah, Rome was pretty badass. Not the greatest soldiers, not the greatest tactics, but the greatest ability to learn thanks to ingenious leaders made all of those irrelevant, and made them the best at all of everything.

I have been reading history since 1st grade.
I'm 52 years old now, and new discoveries happen every year.

I could study Ancient Rome and Napoleonic books forever.

It also helps to have an analytical or dialectical mind.

Oh, the Legionnaires were great soldiers.
Perhaps you are comparing them to warriors, which are not the same as professional soldiery.

>History podcasts
you got any recommendations senpai?

Alright, here we go

>texting friend
>f: What are you doing?
>m: just reading about how batshit insane the Quakers were
>f: Go on (he's used to this sort of thing and so the following dump was not unexpected)
>m:

Basically they started out as a small sect of guys who said fuck it to rigid doctrine and figured, as long as you believe in God, we're cool. They believed they had to search for the word of God, and this came with a weird masochistic cult of martyrdom where all the bullshit they dealt with traveling through untamed America was their duty to suffer for God.
Enter the Puritans, who came to America specifically to make Puritan towns to be Puritan in, and if you aren't Puritan, fuck off.
So these Quakers would show up and start preaching nonPuritan bullshit, and the Puritans would tell them to fuck off. The Quakers would then proceed to not fuck off, so the Puritans would rough them up a bit and stick them on a horse out of town.
The Quakers see this as an opportunity to suffer for their beliefs, and start showing up to Puritan towns in droves. Puritans, not realizing what's happening, start treating them worse and worse, escalating to whippings and mutilation and eventually hangings. The Quakers bear all this cheerfully and make mass migrations to the towns where they get the worst treatment, in particular Salem and Boston.
At one point this Quaker shows up, they sentence her publicly to death, take her up to the gallows, hang the guy in front of her, and then stick her on a horse out of town hoping she's learned her lesson. She basically goes "Aw, man" and comes back the next week, so the Puritans just kind of sigh and hang her for real.
This seems to drop off once enough Quakers turn up that they found their own colony in PA, where a new set of weird shit occurs.

>
Honestly I got started off video games ( Dynasty Warriors, Total War ) then moved on to shows and wikipedia

Yes I'm sure you have such a passion for history.

At this point they had gained a reputation for being fuckin weird, so they grabbed onto it, dressing drably and refusing to take off their hats in other people's houses and ironically going from the guys that shunned doctrine into guys with a really rigid code.
This contrasts with the Puritans, who got more and more lax as their communities grew. Which maybe is why the martyrdom thing stopped.
Anyway, a big thing with the Quakers was that they A) refused to take oaths, viewing them as swearing, and thus forbidden by the Bible, and B) were pacifists, and only had like two crimes that they'd hang a guy for, murder and treason.
And everyone still considered themselves Brits so they tried to adhere heavily to both the Bible and English law.
English law would hang a motherfucker for fuckall, by the way. It was much more concerned with property than human life.
Now, basically everything from holding political office to testifying in court required an oath, and this essentially paralyzed PA government.
The Quakers tried to bypass it with "affirmations", which were basically just oaths without triggerwords like God and promise, the non-Quakers in the community were distrustful of these guys not wanting to take oaths, and the English government eventually said "alright, you guys can do affirmations, but someone has to administer oaths to non-Quakers."
Quakers wouldn't administer what they wouldn't swear to, so they had to find a minority non-Quaker for literally any legal action that wasn't totally filled with Quakers. This kept Quakers out of the highest offices, and combined with the not killing thing made people regard the place as an anarchist's paradise.

>Not the greatest soldiers
They were though. Professional soldiers training almost every day are better than any noble Celt or German warrior who thinks he's the shit

They would challenge Romans to single combat thinking they would have the advantage but the Romans kept winning

Not that user, but whats your problem with starting with vidya games. I'm sure a lot of people got interested into history by playing stuff like EU3 or Total War

In one case a guy was murdered and because of all the Quaker witnesses and jurors, the suspects were let free on bail for three years until the Deputy Governor (the biggest authority in the colonies) retried them and executed them before their appeal could reach London, which pissed people off more because now you have guys getting killed by unsworn juries.
Eventually there was a compromise where Quakers could legally use their affirmations for whatever provided they adopt Britain's capital punishment laws, drastically increasing the amount of lethal verdicts. The author condemns this as sacrificing the rights of the people for a really quibbling principle.
And even then they tended to keep a non-Quaker as their Deputy Governor because they didn't want to be morally responsible for saying "Let's shoot those Indians/Frenchmen who keep attacking us." There was in fact a whole crisis in which the Delawares broke their alliance with the colonists (Indian diplomacy was notoriously finicky) and started massacring western frontier settlers. The Quakers, who still held most of the power in PA at this time, said that they were just misunderstood and were doing this because they'd been wronged in some way. They then gave the Indians money which was used to buy guns and were clueless as to why people kept dying, culminating in most of the Quakers resigning from the colonial government in 1756ish. Maybe this sounds familiar.

Before stepping down, however they briefly considered isolating themselves and renouncing British sovereignty, which leads to my favorite sentence in this book thusfar:
"It would be difficult to find a more tangled story in all American history than that of how the Quakers, in 1756,finally made their choice. A host of conflicting factions and interests were involved. *The issue of pacifism was inevitably bound up with the question of taxes, and nothing arouses moral fervor more effectively than finding reasons not to pay taxes.*"

That's the end of it. The book in question is The Americans: The Colonial Experience by Daniel Boorstin. Pretty great book in my opinion.

>implying Veeky Forums is one person
It's probably everyone has at least one topic they know tonnes about, and respond appropriately
Best way to learn about tonnes of stuff is to watch ENGLISH documentaries and ENGLISH historical fiction to make you begin to understand the home front of societies
Stressing English due to higher budget and set quality along with not having to appeal with the lowest common denominator

>know everything about german rations during ww2
>know jack shit about china exept for the han and the sheer rape that was the 19th century

Too bad that watching english documentaries is the best way to learn only bullshit and reading english historical fiction will only teach you about late republic early empire Rome, the napoleonic wars and the world wars.
I'm pretty sure people here read actual history books (at the very least the more casual ones) to cultivate their historical hobbies.

I would bet money that 99.99% of historically literate people under 30 started getting interested due to tv shows and videogames.

Specialize. Pick one very specific piece of history and drill down on it. A war. An important battle. The rule of a specific leader. Read books and articles that give different perspectives. Think critically and form your own educated opinions.

Once you've done it once, you'll understand the process.

There are people this old here? Damn.

I wasn't allowed to read fiction as a child, and also had no television.
My craving for stories lead me to marathon readings of biography and history.

Read more.

Read books, listen to podcasts, watch documentaries

>I wasn't allowed to read fiction as a child
The fuck?
Is this some religious bullshit on the line of "all fiction is lies, don't read lies"?

what's you're favourite meme, gramps?

History compounds on it self. Nothing is created independently. Every past, has a past. Find out the first past of something that interests you, and you'll soon have a want to go even further to things either loosely tied to your first interests or pure tangents.

Example:
>Be black american
>Wanting to find the most objective material by a black person of the slavery/civil war in america
>Find 800 p. book by w.e.b dubois
>read, take notes of interesting things inside
>finish it in about 2 months (of just going to the library every day or so after class)
>Time to find something else

You bet your booty.

Thanks user. That was pretty neat

Hey, I'm glad someone thought so.

Don't ever write a history book. Actually, don't ever write anything again.

The thing I like about this criticism is how constructive it is.

hit the nail on the head

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. One of if not the best podcast out there. He's amazing and always keeps the story interesting. I'd recommend his Wrath of the Khans series. It's a slow burn but once it heats up it becomes one of the most interesting things ever.

You're an idiot I enjoyed reading what he wrote.

those dudes were crazy, thanks for the info!

Bump

Don't worry judging from your avatar you still have a better grasp on history then most African Americans.

I've got nothing better to do.

The scale of naval combat still amazes me to this day.

Same thoughts as you, OP.

How about Veeky Forums gives me a moderately interesting but slightly obscure historical period and place and I'll spend the next year reading and learning everything I can about it.

why don't you stop being such a lazy piece of shit and do things by yourself

lol if I don't receive a reply then I'll just pick something myself. I only asked because I wanted to introduce a bit of randomness to it