I want to learn history. Where should I start? I was thinking the Renaissance?

I want to learn history. Where should I start? I was thinking the Renaissance?

get a real degree

I mean to learn through private study

Bump

That's a waste of time and money.

Id start industrialization, will give you a good unerstanding on why the world is the way it is today

This.

SEE

start with the greeks

What do you think is interesting? If you're doing it for personal study, it's best if you start with stuff you're actually interested in.

Start with prehistory.

Get an overview of the world first, then dive down into general specifics. Cover range of civilizations. Then move down the timeline and see how things change every 1000 years or so, once you near the 1000 BCE, thats where the critical mass reaches and lots of history gets recorded from then point on. You can then narrow it down to 100 year intervals. Once you reach 1500s, you can leap down to every couple of decades. Around 20th century, you can start once every ~2-3 years or so.

start with your country's history
It should be pretty easy after you're done with it

Do not start with the Renaissance. That is not to say that it is unimportant, but it is only half the story...

Judging from your post, I'm assuming that you are interested primarily in studying history as it relates to the contemporary world. The classical "start" date for a "western culture" is Rome. This is less a result of Rome in of itself, and more to do with how the symbolic concept of Rome came to influence a Western self-conception throughout the middle ages, through the Renaissance, and still today.

Beginning with Rome is not a bad idea for private study (if you wish to bring this into a professional academia then this starting point is problematic). You should concentrate not solely on what happened (i.e Caesar died in 44bc) but also on why it happened. One of the great things about studying Rome is that some of their built environments survive. You should try to study the ways in which Augustus and subsequent emperors articulated their legitimacy and power through imperial fora and other state-sponsored artistic projects.

This will be especially important if you wish to study the Renaissance, as many of these forms will resurface (literally, Michelangelo and others will perform rudimentary archaeology) and they will become fixtures in political, artistic, and social self-understanding.

Cont...


This is but one historical relationship, however it is a crucial one. If you can see the historical ties between these two eras, then you will begin to see how medieval thought differed from Renaissance thought, and thus Renaissance thought will seem to be a response both to the distant and near past. This will allow you also to begin to see the ways in which the post-Renaissance world is in constant communication to past modes of thought and expression, providing a nice foil for ways to understand the world which we inhabit today.

Pic related: The School of Athens by Raphael. Note how Plato is pointing up while Aristotle is gesturing towards the natural world around him. Thus the two main currents of western thought are represented in dialogue with one another, contextualized in the world of the Renaissance. The surly man working on a block of marble is Michelangelo, while the meeker man to the right staring at the viewer is Raphael himself.

When Human Civilization started.

If you start at the XIV-XV youre missing a lot of fun.
Just start at the period you like most, Im sure you Wouldnt care in a week.

>I want to learn history. Where should I start? I was thinking the Renaissance?

You don't just start with a period in history and go century by century to the present.

If you're curious about history, you want to do two things:

First, you want to get a decent idea of the span of time, so as to put everything in context, so that dates arent just numbers, but points on a scale you can picture in your mind, so when someone mentions an event in at a specific date, you know what was going on in the world at that time. This doesn't need to be in depth, just knowing the main points of any different time period, so for example when someone says something about the 5th cent AD, you know that's the century of the WREs collapse, China had an interdynastic divide, the Huns are kicking about Europe, Sassanids are in Persia, the Gupta Empire was big in India and so on. This is so you can contextualise any information you pick up. A good knowledge of geography is also very important here.

Secondly, you don't need to know everything about everything. Pick time periods that interest you and delve into them. If you're interested in the Renaissance, go as deep as you want into that. It doesn't matter that someone else knows everything there is to know about WW2 tank designs or Minoan womens fashion, while you don't know shit. No one can know everything. Eventually you'll get bored of a subject and pick a new one, that's how people have general knowledge about many different periods, because many people get interested as children, and have been through so many phases of obsession about one particular place and time that they've a decent idea about a number of them.

If you just 'start with the Greeks' or something and go onward like reading an encyclopaedia from A to Z, you'll find that most of history is boring as fuck (to you, to someone else, different parts will be boring), and you can't be bothered to learn about it, and you get turned off the subject.

Start modern contemporary, and work your way backwards based on ancillary past events that influenced them.

Start with the Greeks

Start with the Greeks

this
also you should pace yourself and not be afraid to come back to things or just give up
I was reading a book on the Vikings last year and I got sick of it right before I got to the part that was the most interesting to me conceptually and I took ages to get back to it

the big bang

LEWD!

start with current events and the last 20 years