BOOKS

Because according to Neil Diamond Europa was either a place of milk and honey, so we had it easy. Or Europe was a harsh place so people had to strong and develop.
This somehow explains why various regions of Africa was less developed for centuries, despite it being a continent packed to the brim with natural resources

Also, the extreme distances in Africa is also a valid reason why technology didn't develop as fast, while europeans being good at implementing new technologies and knowledge is basically cheating.
TL:DR fuck whitey.

Why do some people on Veeky Forums hate this book all of sudden? I knew this from here and everyone were saying it's good. What the fuck went wrong with Veeky Forums now.

>Decide to get into history
>In need a quick tldr
>Read GGS
>First chapter
>Goes on about which races he are smarter than other.
>Whites are the dumbest race, but you should listen to me anyway
>Geographical determinism is right because all other theories are racist
>Rest of the book
>dindu nuffin
>More determinism
>Last chapter
>ITS NOT GEOGRAPHICAL DETERMINISM, RACIST (it is though)

Stormfags who are buttdevastated at anything that doesn't claim the white race descended from the heavens, destined to walk as gods upon the Earth, more than likely.

The 3 "essential essays" of Boris Chicherin:
"On the People's Representation"
"The Course in State Science"
"Property and the State"
I think they were compiled into a new book called "Freedom, Equality and Market" or something like that by Yale or Oxford

Don't get me wrong, it was a pretty good book. He does provide counter theories and admits the role of culture in a civilizations development. the authors virtue signaling just drives me up a fucking wall.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

It's 19th century white supremacist drivel. Historical determinism has been debunked in academia for decades, something Diamond would know if he had any training in anthropology or history at all (he is in fact an ornithologist).

Some books I've read that I can recommend.

>The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians -- Peter Heather
>Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia -- James Cracraft
>Russia: People and Empire -- Geoffrey Hoskings
>Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World -- Mark C. Elliot
>The Punic Wars -- Brian Caven
>Orthodox Christianity, Volume I -- Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev
>Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity -- Otto FA Meinardus
>History of the Catholic Church -- James Hitchcock
>Suetonius -- The Caesars
>Plutarch -- Roman Lives
>Nicholas & Alexandra -- Robert Massie (I won't bother including the initial because if you don't know who this is, you need to do more reading)
>War Before Civilization -- Lawrence Keeley

For a more textbook-style thing:

>A History of the Roman People -- Allen M Ward, Fritz M Heichelheim, and Cedric A Yeo
>A History of East Asia -- Charles Holcombe

Wanting to get Adrian Goldsworthy's books on the Roman military too.

Its written in worse style than Soviets block history books.
They usually had entry and ending filled with political statements as tip to ruling Party when middle of the book keep free of it(as censors usually read only this as they lack knowledge or patience to read it all). So if you skip this necessary for publication stuff you often get good quality stuff. Although you would need to get hang of some of terminology.
GGS is on the other hand filled with political statements and contradict themselves on plenty occasions.

So is it too racist or not racist enough? I've only watched the NatGeo or whoever special on it in high school, seemed pretty intuitive.
You need flint to hunt the antler to make a pick to mine the copper to conquer the places that have tin to make bronze. basically tech tree.

The overall theory is partly correct, I think, but the problem is that Diamond seems to attribute EVERY advantage that European civilization had over others to geographical determinism.

Any good books about the Russian Civil war?

19th Century Tier Geographical determinism.

these bibliographies
pastebin.com/UXeqUWNd
pastebin.com/vqY1DtEt

Agreed. I prefer Mr. Diamond when he is directing his efforts towards capturing America's hearts through his timeless songwriting and emotive vocal stylings.

>So is it too racist or not racist enough?
In a way, both. Diamond argues against genetic superiority, which pisses of the racists, but still removes human agency as a factor in most of his explanations, which makes it very easy for people to get the impression that some kind of innate superiority was going on.

His book is sort of like the equivalent of your uncle trying to prove he's not a racist by talking about how he has black friends and explaining how they're different from niggers.

Hitler's Willing Executioners is a sober and impartial analysis of the German national consciousness.

It's especially bad because there are plenty of explanations other than environment that explain why other parts of the world didn't advance like the West did (e.g. the equilibrium trap).

>basically tech tree
>people applying vidya logic to history

pls stop

Fernand Braudel's works on the Mediterranean have been recommended to me as essential reading on early Modern Europe, though I haven't gotten around to them yet. Right now, I'm reading The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz, which provides some interesting arguments for explaining why the West industrialized and the East didn't, all the while providing counterpoints and refutations to commonly encountered arguments and perceptions. He does tend to meander a bit, though.

What Hath God Wrath is good US history from a period often forgotten

>Thinking you can learn currency before archery
Fucking retard

Pic unrelated

Really anything in the Oxford History of the United States is excellent.

Most people hate him because this board says to hate him. I hate him because he ignores history that doesn't fit his narrative

>Places with no conflict advance less
>China was lost advancement for this reason even though it was constantly at war with outsiders and itself

>Africa has no large domesticable animals
>ignores that Africa domesticated it's own species of cattle not long after Eurasians which are found from cape to horn to West Africa and that Elands are domesticable but no one tried until colonization

It's dumb shit, but it irks the fuck out of me

>All of a sudden
That book has been despised here since the board was created and is usually only posted as a troll. Lurk more.

...

takimag.com/article/rough_diamond_steve_sailer/print

I found this article about Guns Germs and Steel very interesting.

It's never been popular on his.

>Is my lecturer a fraud?
An archeologist who unironically presents Jared Diamond lectures as resources? Probably.

You're not supposed to just read a few books and base everything off them. You're supposed to read multiple books and cross reference the knowledge in them in order to get a complete picture.

Most of you are memeing retards from /pol/ that think "informative" images are gospel, so anything recommended or told to you will be completely useless. I personally wish all of you would leave this board.

Dunning-Kruger lad. You cant help it and you cant not do it.

It has nothing to do with racism, in my opinion.
But he just can't make up his mind whether europeans had it hard, and africans easy, or vice versa, but in the same breath he is basically disregarding everything Europe achieved based on that conflicting arguement.

Quite interesting. And fuck me the comments:
"After I and my topflight roster of PhD research associates spent years studying the matter of low property values in black neighborhoods — compiling reams of data and statistics, interviewing and surveying thousands of relevant parties, and exploring all the various hypotheses brought forward — what we ultimately concluded was that black neighborhoods have low property values because they're full of negroes.

Answer to a deleted comment:
Yes, this was our conclusion as well. The Nobel committee, however, was for some reason unimpressed with our work.

And as for the African predilection for overpopulation, we only got as far as narrowing it down to something having to do with a Zimbabwean phrase we've yet been able to translate: Muh dick.

Our next avenue of scientific inquiry asks the question: Why do Arabs stink?"

People are just recommending good introductions to topics. Go fuck yourself, faggot.

I'm looking for some good WW1 novels by Germans who actually fought in the war.

Any suggestions?

Shelby Foote is bae

>Whites are the dumbest race, but you should listen to me anyway
He never said that.

Storm of Steel is the most popular. My Reminisces of East Africa is another, but it's more memoir than novel.

Are there any good books on the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or niche Soviet subjects in general?

If anyone is interested in the first world war read Myths and Legends of the First World War. Really dispels the "sat in the trench for months and years and were bombed 24/7" retarded American notions of WW1.

Lions led by donkeys. LMAO.

This was the most fascinating book on North Korea I've ever read.

I'm reading "the world of the shining prince" for a class. It's about Heian Japanese culture. It's not a casual read though, not much of a story and more of a description

what's it about

Does anyone know of a good history of the industrial revolution? Preferably a good blend of economic and political stuff.

Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger

North Korean ideology, worldview, and propaganda.

Supposedly he claimed that people can't domesticate and ride zebras, which seems to be false

>Race and Culture: A World View by Thomas Sowell
>Migrations and Cultures: A World View by Thomas Sowell
>Conquests and Cultures: An International History
>Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell

I'm noticing a pattern here

this stuff emphasizes british example
Landes, David. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
>A broad economic history of industrialism, with emphasis on machinery, machine tools, and metallurgy. Chapter 2 discusses the distinctive features of Britain that supported mechanical innovation and increased productivity, especially pp. 99–123.
Samuel, Raphael. “Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain.” History Workshop 3.1 (Spring 1977): 6–72.

>An illuminating social and economic history that surveys a wide variety of mechanized trades and manufactures, with emphasis on discontinuous and incremental change. Argues that resistance to machinery was an “endemic” feature of 19th-century industrial life and labor.
Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009.
>One of the few recent and accessible introductions to machinery devoted specifically to the Victorian period. Treats industrial production, Babbage’s calculating machine, the telegraph, the steamship, electricity, and new cultural approaches to the living human machine. Includes discussions of period literature and culture. Brief bibliography. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Provides an illuminating period-specific definition of the terms mechanical (pp. 167–169) and organic (pp. 189–192), noting their relatively recent divergence of meaning in the early 19th century.

Cardwell, D. S. L. From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age. London: Heinemann, 1971.
>A landmark text on the influence of steam power engineering on theories of heat and, ultimately, classical thermodynamics. Argues that science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine to science.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
>A pioneering cultural history of railways and industrialized consciousness in literature, art, architecture, journalism, and psychoanalysis. Discusses related transformations of time, space, social relations, and new concepts of industrial fatigue, shock, and trauma. Defines the railway as the consumer’s most direct encounter with new technological discipline. Accessible and extremely influential.
see more books in here
pastebin.com/NEkhdCeR

With a name like that, doesn't seem likely

I really enjoyed Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire. Focused more on the administration of Germany by the Third Reich, and didn't devote half of the book to the fucking shoah

Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is pretty good if you're into war and music history as well as the Stalin-era USSR in general.

>everyone was saying this was good
they were memeing you retard

Does Veeky Forums like Kagan?

The patrician's choice.

My boy.

neocon hack like his brother Donald. but at least donald is good at classical history and writes interesting things about the peloponnesian war.

>Donald
>Hack

i qualified the statement immediately, my dear little brainlet

And you called him a neocon hack regardless.

anyone have any recs about intelligence agencies?
could be about their history, procedures, shitty things they've done, whatever

Get some irl grand strategy in your life, Veeky Forums

good one

Because donald chose to shill it to the detriment of his scholarship (see his book on Pericles which os neocon propaganda).

Meme.

Geography matters, and the problem with Diamond is not that he is "too racist." The problem is that he is not a historian, and he uses misleading historical examples (his description of the fall of the Inca empire shows he has no fucking clue) to support his broader thesis.

It's pop history. It's not complete drivel, and biological determinism has been discussed before and after, but it's not a respectable work.

It points out a lot of relevant and overlooked stuff (geography is important), bu it's not the be all end all of history it's treated as or claims to be. Nobody 'likes' GG&S because nobody agrees with it's ultimate conclusions and over simplifications of history.

This. Mazower is bretty gud.

>very easy for people to get the impression that some kind of innate superiority was going on.

Except that's wrong. The entire point of the book is that Europeans were simple in the right place at the right time with the right conditions to enable them to colonize Africa and the New World.

Diamond explains this in depth, I don't see how ANYONE bar someone with severe cognitive dissonance could interpret his book as being racist.

I don't even agree with him, but the book does NOT say that

p.s. Jared Diamond is a Jew.

archive.org/stream/humanbulletssold00sakuiala#page/n9/mode/2up

Awesome memoir about Siege of Port Arthur from a Japanese perspective.
Only book that ever made me cry.

have you read anything on the Russian side like denikin's memoirs? anyway thanks for the rec russo-japanese war is massively underrated so i look forward to reading anything about it

bait detected

I read Tretyakov, but he was terribly dry in comparison to Sakurai.
I haven't read Denikin, but I'll be sure to check him out. I only knew him from the civil war.
And yeah, Russo-Japanese War is underappreciated. The whole Tsushima affair is fucking hilarious.

>He doesn't agree with me so it's propaganda.
How dare he forms opinions and interpretations.

these are such memes
people just want a good book but a list of 30 books thrown at them all at once

Then you take the time to that list. I'd rather have these lists than nothing.

How up to date are these?

that other user is right. someone else might well come along to give you a recommendation, but in a lot of cases the topic asked for is too obscure for most anons to have read about here, or someone who has read about it is not at present browsing the board for whatever reason, or someone who DOES recommend something doesn't always recommend the best thing to read (though this is subjective). So why criticize someone for posting the bibliographies? You can find an introductory work within pretty fast if you are, indeed, interested in reading about a subject. The bibliographies also have some useful basic information about the topic and about the historiography of the topic as well. Your desire to have everything spoonfed to you is childish and lazy desu

He disregards all research on race and IQ as "racist" and postulates as fact his unproven egalitarian dogma.

Taken from the preface:

>My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working
with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning
of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average
more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in
things and people around them than the average European or American
is
>That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior
to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating
developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized
societies now grow up

uhhmm sweetie. I already implied that a lot of his scholarship is pretty good and enjoyable. I state it now clearly for you now if you didn't get the picture before. But there's no doubt that he has sometimes used classical history as a vehicle to shill his neocon views, views that are absolutely ridiculous and anachronistic to impose on the past and on pericles to say the least.

Ill keep that in mind about Tretyakov, ty

Made in like the 70's, so good enough. All on b-ok.org

>Uses brainlet and uhm sweetie
It's like you don't want to be taken seriously. Also, you don't seem to understand I'm contesting the negative comments you are making, I can disagree with one part of your statement and disagree with the other.

>ornithologist
kek, the only way it would be funnier is if he were a herpetologist

what negative comments? that i'm against neoconservatism? you haven't done anything to dispel my belief that it is a cancerous ideology

You called him a neocon hack and called his work on Pericles neocon propaganda and called him a shill. I'm not arguing that neoconservatism is good, I'm saying that his work isn't that.

he supported the iraq war. he is a strong supporter of israel (that is a whole other issue. supporting a jewish state per se isn't bad but how it has historically developed is highly detestable in certain ways, most particularly regarding the shameless settler colonial program that expels natives). it's no secret he used the pericles book to shill a certain ideal he held for the ideal american society. there may be some admirable qualities in instilling a civic nationalism but its still shilling nonetheless and especially for one that is used as means to justify warmongering in the middle east.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland