History

Working full time as a legal clerk and a lot of these books are big, but ill be reading 3-4 hours per day outside work. So might get more than 10 in.

Oh, that's different then.

Definitely read something about Rome; her parallels with modern America are striking and fascinating. Secondary sources will be your best bet so long as you have a time constraint, but you may want to at least peek into a primary source. The penguin edition of Polybius is a ~300 page selection from his history of the Punic wars (264-146BC) and I think would stand alone as a great insight to Roman culture, history, values, and political structure, much of which you will find mirrored in modern times, especially America. This passage is from Livy, but refers to the same era and should reinforce my point:

>There really was, it seemed, a nation on this earth prepared to fight for the freedom of other men, and to fight at her own expense, and at the cost of hardship and peril to herself; a nation prepared to do this service not just for her near neighbours, for those in her part of the world, for lands geographically connected with her own, but even prepared to cross the sea in order to prevent the establishment of an unjust dominion in any quarter of the globe, and to ensure that right and justice, and the rule of law, should everywhere be supreme. By the single utterance of the herald all cities of Greece and Asia had been granted liberty. To conceive such a hope needed a bold spirit: to bring that hope to realization was a proof of boundless courage and good fortune without limit.

Polybius is also especially concerned with the decline of civilizations, as fallen Carthage was to him what fallen Rome kind of is to us. Hence the iconic razing of Carthage (this time from Polybius, not Livy):

>Turning round to me at once and grasping my hand Scipio said, “A glorious moment, Polybius; but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced upon my own country.” It would be difficult to mention an utterance more statesmanlike and more profound. For at the moment of our greatest triumph and of disaster to our enemies to reflect on our own situation and on the possible reversal of circumstances, and generally to bear in mind at the season of success the mutability of Fortune, is like a great and perfect man, a man in short worthy to be remembered.

Unfortunately I don't know anything about human bio/psych, or really any american history, so I can't really help beyond that. Definitely consider Gibbon's decline & fall (probably the abridged edition from penguin would be your best bet), but you may also want to check out 1st century BC rome, with the republic decaying into empire. Syme's "roman revolution" is supposed to be a great modern book on it; Appian's "civil wars" are relatively short and interesting; Sallust's two historical works "jugurtha" and "catiline" capture the mood rather than the details of a corrupt and decaying republican Rome.

PS this has been popping up on my radar more and more. Haven't read it, but it sounds like it could be perfect for you:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History

>1. historiography
Check out Georg Iggers, _The German Conception of History._ Magisterial but old book on the all-important origins of academic history, and the various forms of German historicism that dominated it.

While learning about historicism, take a detour and learn about Dilthey and the German debate over the divide between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. You'll have to learn some of this anyway if you're reading Collingwood.

You'll also want to learn about the history of the other human sciences, which sprang up as a response to German historicism, because they have regularly been incorporated into historiography or restructured it. Good to know a basic outline of 1) Durkheim's sociology, 2) the historical geography of Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache, 3) the German school of historical economy, 4) Max Weber, 5) the debates over Auguste Comte's positivism as it applies to human sciences (which influences people like James Frazer and Herbert Spencer), 6) the growth of anthropology (Mauss to Levi-Strauss especially).

You should also learn something about "New History" in France, which grew out of Henri Berr, Henri Pirenne, the _Annales_ school, as a gradual reaction against historicism and overly political (or "event-based") history which was dominant in Germany and still France. Berr and Pirenne wanted to inaugurate an interdisciplinary, synthetic study of history as the mistress of the human sciences, incorporating many of the "pretenders" that claim to study human society in the previous paragraph.

The school coalesced around the _Annales_ journal before WW2, and then really took off in the '50s and '60s when Fernand Braudel, arguably the most famous historian of the twentieth century, took the reins. He used the institutional clout established by the school's founders (mostly Lucien Febvre) to utterly dominate French historiography with _Annales_ methods of "structural" history and the "history of mentalities," and these methods radiated outward to the Anglosphere after that.

Several books on the _Annales_, Andre Burguiere's is OK but hard for newbies, maybe Francois Dosse's is better.

You're going to want to understand the history of Marxist historiography at least a little, particularly in Britain. Past & Present is a major journal to know the basic history of. Some of these historians were instrumental in opening the door for _Annales_ methods in the UK. Many you will see often.

You'll want to know about the cultural/anthropological turn in the 70s through cultural anthropology, the linguistic turn in the 80s and 90s with postmodernism. Now we're into all kinds of tedious shit like "the global turn" and "the environmental turn" (which is still strong I think).

>5. modern europe
No idea, but Hobsbawm's book on the 19th century is good. He's a Past & Present Stalinist apologist though.

Better to take in Foucault synoptically so you can see what parts of his work you like in some actual clarity than to just dive into random books of his with no theoretical background otherwise. _Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason_ by Gutting is OK. Dreyfus and Rabinow also have a book critiquing him.

Carr is OK but once you understand things like historicism or Collingwood's idealist historicism you will probably see Carr (and a lot of Anglos, honestly) as dinky. There are a lot of things like Carr floating around that they'll make you read in intro historiography classes. I would recommend that you tackle historiography as a German would tackle philosophy, i.e., historically. The English want to read everything as atomistic texts for some weird reason, and most historians specialise without ever thinking about theory or the context of what they do. If you want to get into shit like Foucault, you're going to have to know the history of your discipline.

Skip Diamond unless it's just as a fun read. He gets panned by colleagues.

Gibbon is really long, antiquated, and mostly covers very late Roman history and then Byzantine history. Definitely read it if you feel up to it, but if you're trying to read it to learn Roman history, just read synoptic textbooks and primary sources. There are only two major general textbooks on early Republican Rome worth reading.

AJP Taylor is OK. I don't know much about WW2 historiography and shit.

Use Oxford Bibliographies a lot for subjects you don't know much about.

I'm assuming the Skinner thing is on the Cambridge school of intellectual history, which you should know about.

Collingwood's idealist stuff is hard and dense, and you may not understand it. His autobiography is short and fun though, and I think Idea of History is OK. His autobio will give you an idea of how incompetent Englishmen are at doing history (and philosophy). Something seriously wrong with the English.

Dunno about Asimov but H.G. Wells has some big general history (3vol _Outline of History_) that was kind of fun. Another thing historians suck cock at, even still in grad school: basic chronology. So many people have fuzzy-ass ideas of periods outside the one they're directly studying. Reading old, outdated, traditional historiography is often a good way to get that basic chronology down, not least because it's often of literary classic quality in and of itself.

Random aside, some clunky synoptic textbooks I liked for getting a handle on eras/places I don't study:
>Meiggs' updated version of J.B. Bury's _History of Greece_
>Marshall Hodgson's _Venture of Islam_
>Riasanovsky's _History of Russia_
>Runciman's _History of the Crusades_ (very outdated)
>Najemy _Italy in the Age of the Renaissance_

Right off the bat, I think you have the right attitude for sure in being ambitious and enthusiastic, but you should temper it with the realism that you probably look like an amateurish fuck to professionals. You kind of want to maintain a weird tension between aiming higher than your peers seem to think is reasonable, and consulting professors who are experts on the topics you're researching like mad, to make sure you aren't being an amateurish dilettante.

>The first will be the interplay between biology/hormones
This is big right now with environmental history riding high and plenty of these historians integrating sciences like biology into their study. But this:
>how this can to an extent predict the rise and falls of civilisations as well as explain why and when societies go to war.
is riskier, because while environmental historians of "biological history" may hint at grandiose conclusions like this after writing a mammoth book, the book itself will be a case study and they won't explicitly say anything. It might be OK for a BA thesis, but you might want to at least consider dialling back the grandiosity of your conclusions.

Again, it's usually enough to HINT at the importance of the factor you're examining, in a carefully researched empirical study of an actual example of that factor being important historically. Most history profs (and grad schools) will be less interested in a quirky thesis that directly states an overarching philosophy of history. Hayden White would say the latter has a "bad odor" about it (_Metahistory_, '73~) to professional historians. Arthur Danto (_Analytical Philosophy of History, '65) would say that it's not real history. It's why Toynbee (_A Study of History_) or Oswald Spengler are seen as unserious and not a real historian, by historians. Overt Marxists are disliked for the same reason -- they don't do the "wie es eigentlich gewesen" nitty-gritty empirical research, but instead try to impose overarching schemata on the past.

>namely the recent shift in american politics.
This might also be risky but it could work if you had guidance and were careful. Contemporary stuff veers into social theory and polsci. Many profs will detect the same "bad odor" in anything political or partisan, and what they deem partisan may not be what you deem partisan. Again, you want to do something carefully researched, ideally original research from good archives, for any history paper.

I should also say: again, the English are fucking weird, but so are Americans. They kind of do their own thing, and as a result they are this weird mixture of being influenced by French/German paradigms and other social sciences, and being late (sometimes generations late) to the party on shit that was already done in those countries.

If you want to study English and American history, I'm biased here, but I think you have to learn their respective historiographical and social-scientific traditions AND the French/German traditions.

I only say all this if you're doing some super long haul in history and you want to really master the discipline or something. I don't mean to shove abstruse histories of Rankean historicism and Diltheyan hermeneutics up your ass if you're only looking to do a BA in modern military history or something.

I'm an intellectual historyfag and philosophyfag so I am also biased as fuck in favour of learning the entire history of every stream of thought that even potentially influences the discipline, so take that with a grain of salt.

I think going too far in the opposite direction also sucks though. Like I said, most students know very little outside their tiny little fields. Especially grad students. Historians don't generally like theory, much less having a general idea of what "theory" has looked like for the past 200 years. They snip little bits and bobs of theory from the few authors they encounter by chance in some classes, but they never get the bigger picture.

Same with chronology/world history.

Final aside: Look into the TTC / Great Courses lecture series, all of which are easily torrented online, and google Yale OpenCourseWare.

You have exceeded my expectations of what answers i would receive and have given me the tools to begin my history career on the front foot. Thankyou.

I agree with you that grandiose claims emanating from historical analysis can seem amateurish and egotistical. I will have to temper my conclusions (something australians dont do well).

I also believe that your claim regarding german and french history is a good one. From my philosophy experience, the germans have taught me more than any other nationality. I suspect history may be the same. I will certainly learn french/german views on history.

Thanks for your compliment regarding my attitude. I am 23, have completed a law / arts degree which i was never enthusiastic about and lied to myself about why i was doing it.

Now 6 months into the legal profession i have learnt that i dont like it. So i have been deep in thought and have decided to pursue a career in what i deem to be
a) the thing im best at and;
b) the thing which i can contribute to societies understanding of a particular discipline in.

My aim is to be the best historian i can be. I have compiled a list of all your recommendations and i will begin my research.

Also, yes i aim to attempt to master this discipline.

The end goal is to be contributing to humanities understanding of the past to assist us in the future. I'm not in this for a title, position, money or anything else. Due to this, your advice is particularly relevant.

Also how the fuck do you know so much and youre posting on a japanese image board, the wealth of information on Veeky Forums is unbelievable (at times). Cheers user

Don't worry, I just typed a lot of fucking shit because I'm massively autistic. Definitely don't read any presumption of authority into it. Take it about as seriously as you would some random fellow undergrad trying to tell you what to do.

Also, I hope I didn't seem like I was saying you're egotistical - you have rad ideas and I'm more sympathetic to them than I am to some of the historians who would tell you to temper them simply because all big ideas are bad. I'm just trying to warn you of their attitudes, if you're doing things like applying to grad school. But you'll definitely learn all this stuff along the course of a degree anyway, so it's almost moot.

For what it's worth, I went to uni as a mature student to escape a shit dead-end life at 22. My family wanted me to go into law like themselves, and I said absolutely not, because law is a gruelling soul-crushing career unless you solely worship money. Now I'm happier than I've ever been, doing history as a living, literally just reading all day every day. Though I've been very, very lucky - definitely acquaint yourself with the prospects of an academic career before signing on for that shit. You have to be truly quixotic to go into it. Profs themselves will caution you against it.

For what it's worth though, you remind me a lot of myself when I went into it. The motives you list were my motives exactly. Though, again, I don't want to talk down to you, I'm just saying.

>Also, yes i aim to attempt to master this discipline.
>The end goal is to be contributing to humanities understanding of the past to assist us in the future

Not to increase your desire to be a poor adjunct for the next 30 years, but that's really the attitude that gets you an advantage. If you never give that up, and really make it into your entire life, as one of my profs said to me once when I commented that I'm going to be a barista at some point, "eh, there are jobs for those who really want them."

>Also how the fuck do you know so much
Just seems that way because autism + presumption of authority because I happen to be 3 or 4 steps farther along the path than you.

Dont worry mate, i didnt take the ego thing personally, i understood you.

Big ideas are fantastic but you have to be realistic and mature about them.

Take it from me, law IS soul crushing and is nothing but the pursuit of money. Something which i abhor (cant believe it took me 5 years to realise that).

You're basically where i want to be at in the next few years, and i know my quality of life would improve 100 fold if i actually devote myself to something i believe in/am good at.

From my experience at an aussie uni, so many students (grad included) have no idea what theyre doing, arent truly invested in what theyre doing, and refuse to break away from the institutional status quo. I also abhor that and i think meeting this will be my own personal greatest challenge going into this. Have you found this?

No need to be afraid of insulting me, you literally cant offend any aussie worth their salt.

One thing i'm tentative about - many professors that i have met seem to suffer from the same symptom of the students i have met - they are narrow minded and simply regurgitate what's fashionable (a folly of many historians in different eras). However i also understand that good relationships with my peers and those above me are important. Any advice?

Additionally, i read war and peace recently, Tolstoy's ability to cut the bullshit and see through napoelon and the wars astounded me. That's the type of history im interested in, explaining why events happened and why history is a cyclical and inexorable process (i believe due to changing hormones between generations, /r/k selection theory and resource restriction as previously mentioned)

Do your own research. Fuck you.

History is a fun major, so you should be fine.

>1. Historiography
This is a very broad topic, but Renaissance writer Leonardo Bruni is considered the founder of early modern historiography so starting there could be good.
>2. napoleonic wars/french revolution
For French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle is a good starter for English speakers.
>4. australian history specifically ww1 and ww2.
Manning Clark might be a good place to start

>Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
This is worth reading but bear in mind that it's heavily twisted by Enlightenment era biases. Hence Gibbon is heavily critical of Christianity's role in Rome, the "Dark" Middle Ages etc.

Tolstoy is terrible imo

I did my own research, came to a problem, and asked for advice, cunt

>Big ideas are fantastic but you have to be realistic and mature about them.
Yep, but also hold onto the ones you have and develop them. They may just be the seeds of a much more mature form. It took me until grad school to realize that all the stifled hunches and half-blind wonderings I had in undergrad (and even earlier) had wended their way back around and coalesced into major projects that I can actually work on.

Hope you at least got rich nigga. Fuck law.

>students (grad included) have no idea what theyre doing
>many professors that i have met seem to suffer from the same
As long as you take it with a grain of salt, I'll candidly admit that I felt every single co-student and colleague I've ever had was provincial as fuck. All content to stagnate, content to be well-regarded within their little status quo without ever wondering what makes the status quo worth shit to begin with.

Professors too. There are a few brilliant ones, but most are workaday. Again, grain of salt, but I think many are outright incompetent. A lot of people are just career B or A students, people with natural talents for note-taking and organising their material, who coast along and do "OK." Academia is a lot like law, for a lot of them, I think. It's a high prestige profession where you make six figures and take your work home with you.

Candidly, I hate almost all of them and think 98% of academia is just a sinecure for rich kids to coast by doing "OK." My biggest fear in university was "big fish small pond syndrome." I had a similar experience of going to a university outside the big famous Anglosphere ones, basically a nameless American state school. Now I'm at an Ivy and I actually clench up my asshole when I think of how stifling and stagnant the atmosphere was back at that school by comparison, how I even fucking survived it.

I have no idea what it's like in Australia. Maybe the academic circuit there is relatively closed and people don't tend to cross the ocean just for uni? I really don't want to give any advice here because I don't know shit. I'd say, research the fuck out of it so you know what people tend to do. If you want to go to an American university for grad school, you should know every single thing about the process. Fucking up one step can ruin everything.

But I would say, as blanket advice, don't get big fish small pond syndrome. Just by virtue of actually caring, if you are also competent, you may possibly excel (but also don't take that as any guarantee..). But I remember "excelling" at my state school, and almost falling into the trap of thinking that meant fuckall. Now I'm glad I constantly busted my ass, because the high level people here are beyond the highest level of anything at that state school.

Best way I can say it is: Set your sights on objective quality, and don't believe your current milieu when it says that you're great.

Thanks mate, i'll research those authors.

Seems that many caution me on Gibbon, might give him a miss.

>However i also understand that good relationships with my peers and those above me are important. Any advice?

#1 best thing to do if you want a career is to meet every single professor (without being a brown-nosing cunt) and form relationships, try to find mentors, get on their radar, do really good work.

Maybe I am a brown-nosing cunt, fuck knows, but I spent most of undergrad going to every single office hours session I could and asking for general recommendations, asking about the broader historiography and the course content, etc.

I met amazing professors and ended up getting extremely good letters of recommendation which are basically the only reason I'm in grad school.

As far as socialising with other students, probably a very good idea, but I have horrific autism so I mostly avoided them. Don't do that!! (Maybe?)

I will say, I made like a dozen amazing friends HERE, within just a few months, because I actually had some fucking things in common with people here. At my old school everyone was basically just a rich kid studying history because they had to do something or the trust fund would be cut off. Here, it's almost wall-to-wall passionate and competent people.

Regarding your peers being shit, im glad its not just me having those thoughts.

Good points about not resting on your laurels, theres always somebody out there working harder with more natural talent than you.

Australians don't travel overseas to do university apart from 6 month/year long exchanges. That's just travelling under the guise of education.

The University of Sydney does have a program with Cambridge where maybe 20 people will get to go over there (thats a goal of mine, but need a HD average). Apart from that, nobody goes overseas to study.

DESU i love australia and wouldnt want to leave, but i would consider doing no more than a few years of study overseas if i felt it was worth it.

I did not get rich nigga and ive gotta do it for a few more months to scrape together enough cash to do this history major properly. I should just dress as a sheep and sell my asshole to some New Zealanders instead.

No worries m8. I'm a philosophy undergrad Ausfag who has done history subjects as well.

Might I ask what Uni you're planning to go to?

Gonna have to seek out a good program so that i dont stagnate.

I'm not autistic so i should be fine (id also like to bang some history major qt's). I'll strike up convos with my professors and try and set myself apart from the others. thanks for the advice user. Good luck with everything.

So far its between ANU (solely because ive heard it has a fantastic history faculty with great resources)
University of Sydney
UNSW

I'm from sydney so not that keen to travel to Canberra, usyd is probably my first pick.

How has philosophy/history at an aussie uni treated you?

I'm at USyd and it's alright so far. Most other students are fairly brain-dead but the lecturers are usually quite balanced and generally politically neutral. Granted I've only done one semester so far.

All i learnt at UTS arts was marxism and why being a white cis male was bad. Politically neutral is refreshing.

Haha yeah I was doing a science degree at UTS for a while. I didn't enjoy it. Some lecturers barely spoke English.

>Politically neutral is refreshing.
I'm pretty far-right but I found it easy to listen to really.

I'm far right too, but politics should be left out of lectures wherever possible.

UTS can suck the fattest part of my dick

>politics should be left out of lectures wherever possible.
Oath

>UTS arts was marxism
why does a failed theory of human behavior still have a place in academics

Because it hasn't failed

switch to stem before it is too late

t. history major who graduated, found no good jobs, and is now doing mechanical engineering

Good luck to you too, dude. Cambridge/Oxford is probably a good bet but I hear their PhDs are less competitive than Americans on the job market because they're shorter? So be a bit careful.

Godspeed. If you ever get a chance and you like the German stuff, make sure to read Heidegger at some point so you can read Ricoeur and Koselleck. Also read Burckhardt at some point.

Remember to talk to profs who interest you and try to get them interested in you.

OP, on this user's suggestion of Carlyle.

Carlyle's history is not only very good for history, it's important for historiography because it's a first person imagined account. It's a bit more in the Herodotus school than Thucydides because of that
(Carlyle having not himself been in the revolution, some people are misled he was in the same way that they take Herodotus' comments "This guy in bar told me X" as "Herodotus believes X happened". His facts are pretty solid, but he definitely wasn't there to hear the hoofbeats etc.)
Be warned though, Carlyle expects you to be as educated as he is. Parts left in the original language happen.

>The first will be the interplay between biology/hormones and how this can to an extent predict the rise and falls of civilisations as well as explain why and when societies go to war. (Centred around r/K selection theory). I believe that this link could go a long way to enriching our understanding of ourselves as a species.
There's precedent to disconfirm this. Herodotus looking at the skulls of Egyptians and Persians noted different thicknesses of skulls, which meant that one side could kill the other with inferior force once they went for a head shot, but, as the actual battle turned out, it was not a determining factor in the victory.

It's an interesting thesis, but you'd want to narrow it in on somewhere that doesn't disconfirm it entirely.

You should look up The Social Construction of What? (Hacking) especially the section on Cook.

Will do, and yes I will definitely narrow in on a specific point and not try to change the world in 1 thesis. Thanks for the Carlyle advice

This

T. History major who married a doctor

Yank?

honestly your best bet is asking reddit.comr/askhistorians