(Part 2) Best european history books according to redditors
We found 8,184 Reddit comments discussing the best european history books. We ranked the 2,998 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" is very accurate, but I can recommend the book by Anne Applebaum called "Gulag: A History" which is a thorough study of the gulags.
I have a carving from the bone of one of the wooly mammoths that were occasionally found in the permafrost in the gulag mines. Their flesh was so well preserved that the starving prisoners ate it.
I posted this in another thread, but going to post it again here since it's relevant.
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I feel like we should be mailing textbooks/memoirs on fascism/authoritarianism to our representatives...
I thought about organizing a gofundme to send the same book to all Republican representatives (senate and congress) from Amazon, but I think it would be more effective if it was sent from individual constituents in the rep's districts. I personally feel powerless since all my representatives are democrat, but I think it would send a really powerful message if people in red districts sent copies of books directly from Amazon. It would only cost around $10 to do that, and you can include a gift message with your address and why you're sending it.
People smarter than me probably have better suggestions, and could even point out passages that should be highlighted and bookmarked, but here are a few suggestions off the top of my head:
EDIT: Adding 1984 by Orwell to the list for obvious reasons.
Allot of slightly incorrect information in here already.
Britain DID betray the Arabs and Lawrence did know about it - but not when he began the campaign. There is allot more to it (and trying to simplify this is really difficult); but simply(and skipping over a lot of details):
In summary Britain Pandered to the French - allowed people in London rather than on the field make decisions and messed the whole thing up because Germany was their focus
Further Reading
Fantastic book that explains it all: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Line-Sand-Britain-France-Struggle/dp/1847394574/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425926695&sr=8-1&keywords=A+line+in+the+sand
Quote Summarises quite well: Source Wikipedia
> In May 1917, W. Ormsby-Gore wrote "French intentions in Syria are surely incompatible with the war aims of the Allies as defined to the Russian Government. If the self-determination of nationalities is to be the principle, the interference of France in the selection of advisers by the Arab Government and the suggestion by France of the Emirs to be selected by the Arabs in Mosul, Aleppo, and Damascus would seem utterly incompatible with our ideas of liberating the Arab nation and of establishing a free and independent Arab State. The British Government, in authorising the letters despatched to King Hussein [Sharif of Mecca] before the outbreak of the revolt by Sir Henry McMahon, would seem to raise a doubt as to whether our pledges to King Hussein as head of the Arab nation are consistent with French intentions to make not only Syria but Upper Mesopotamia another Tunis. If our support of King Hussein and the other Arabian leaders of less distinguished origin and prestige means anything it means that we are prepared to recognise the full sovereign independence of the Arabs of Arabia and Syria. It would seem time to acquaint the French Government with our detailed pledges to King Hussein, and to make it clear to the latter whether he or someone else is to be the ruler of Damascus, which is the one possible capital for an Arab State, which could command the obedience of the other Arabian Emirs."
*N.B. Islamic State are now fighting to restore the Borders that Britain once promised
A lot of people here are giving shitty answers and not helping because they disprove of your use of "dark ages."
On behalf on the internet I apologize. They are giving you crap for not knowing something you have expressed interest in learning about.
I am fascinated by the "Dark ages" and I have a history degree and I'm still using the term. I understand it to usually mean "the medieval times" or "the huge time-span that is not usually taught to the average student." Most history in public schools (at least that I've seen) tends to gloss over the time from the Romans to the early renaissance so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that's the era you want. It's my favorite era to study for that reason - most people know so little about this 1000 year span in history.
A good starter book for you would be A world lit only by Fire I loved this book. It's not overly scholarly and is a good read.
Another great one is Mysteries of the Middle Ages... Thomas Cahill is a great writer and if this version of the paperback is anything like my copy it is a visually stunning read. I discovered him through "How the Irish Saved Civilization" which was also great.
Mark Kurlansky's books (Salt and Cod specifically come to mind) are well written, specific histories that cover parts of this time period.
I wish my books weren't still packed (recently moved) because I want to dig through the stack and share them all. :) I suck at remembering names of stuff. I recommend browsing the amazon pages section of "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" for other good recommendations.
Happy Reading!! :)
edit - just remembered this one on the byzantine empire of all the books I've read on the Byzantines, that one is my favorite.
edit I'm getting a lashing for "A World Lit Only By Fire" due to the fact that it contains historical inaccuracies.
Please read this one instead In the year 1000.
I'm not trying to recommend dry scholarly tomes, I am trying to think of books that are fun, interesting, and entertaining to read while still being informative.
The Soviet Union makes an interesting point of comparison. Here's something I learned from Applebaum's Gulag: Animal Farm is broadly right about the political history of the Soviet Union, but is totally wrong about its economic history. Lenin did not undo Tsarist kleptocracy and oversee a halcyon period of prosperity. Rather, his net impact on the average Soviet citizen's standard of living was roughly zero: the War communism policies of 1918-1921 were a substantial step back, and the New Economic Policy of 1922-1928 was a substantial step forward, but in the end the economy was in roughly the same place it had been under the Tsar in 1913. Real growth doesn't happen until Stalin's Five-year plans (derided by Orwell as the "windmill"), which catapult the country into the ranks of the global industrial powers.
This is not to say that Stalinist economic planning was good --- projects like forced agricultural collectivization and the White Sea Canal managed to be both economically useless and human rights atrocities --- but Stalin successfully modernized the Soviet Union, simply because there was so much low-hanging fruit to be plucked through industrialization.
This in turn suggests a variant interpretation of Deng's legacy: all he had to do was set aside the insanity of Maoism and learn from history instead. Even by 20th century standards, Maoism was exceptionally dysfunctional: I like Bryan Caplan's description of the Great Leap Forward's backyard furnaces as cargo cult industrialization. And of course, rolling back Maoism without copping to it took great ideological dexterity and was a substantial achievement. But the example of Stalinism suggests that Deng had a lot of leeway to get things wrong and still make progress.
For the uninitiated...
Fear and Loathing in La Liga
Great history of the rivalry between Barca and Real Madrid. A good history of the context of the Spanish Civil War and the clubs' legacies, etc.
Ok, so your best bet is to read a comprehensive set of books on the matter. For the sake of a quick introduction into the matter, your best bet is from the ''a very short introduction'' series. It gets your feet wet at the very least. Now the best and most comprehensive single book on the matter is by a man called Ian Black see here for the book. It is widely acknowledged as being one of the deepest guides on the conflict that goes beyond the current conflict and back to the British Mandate. He was a guardian lead on the conflict for a number of years and now currently works at the LSE. The book itself has a slight pro-Palestinian bias but then it is up to you to judge if that is warranted or not. Other good books on the matter are as follows; On Palestine by Chomsky (obviously very left leaning), A line in the sand By Barr (A historical understanding of how the conflict as it is today can be grounded in past imperialism), and, Belonging the story of Jews by Schama (A history of Jews, one that I can't give too much info on atm because I am reading it myself).
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Other recommendations that I can give are to subscribe to notifications from the Israelis newspapers etc to get there perspectives on matters. As well as following or subscribing to certain joint peace based groups within the area- my favourites are ''Roots'', ''Combatants for Peace'', and the ''Bereaved families forum''. I've met with all three organisations in the past and I'd say that the second is for sure the most interesting- combining ex-IDF and ex-Hamas forces together to seek a peaceful solution.
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Also just another thing to add when looking at the region specific to Palestine- make sure to differentiate between the west bank and Gaza- they have very different politics and Palestine- like Israelis are not a monolithic group- as seen by the rise of certain countermovements in both Palestine and Israel that are seeking to challenge the hegemony of Abbas and Bibi respectively.
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Any other questions please feel free to ask.
It was extremely violent. I would really recommend "Making Sense of the Troubles". It is an incredibly complicated subject, but the book distills it down pretty well. I used it as a reference for my thesis and I know that it is specifically used in some grad programs in Ireland. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Troubles-Northern-Conflict-y/dp/024196265X
Bear with me here, I swear I will get to the food stuff, but first a bit of background.
The sources we have for these voyages (a collection of sagas and two other works known as "The Book of the Icelanders" and "The Book of Settlement") are all at least 2-4 centuries later than the supposed dates of exploration. This is a fairly typical problem in Scandinavian history. These are oral tales handed down for several generations and then written. The info in them is thus problematic. All that being said, archaeological evidence and our understanding that just because something is "fantastic" doesn't make it "fantastical" all point to a Scandinavian presence at the very northernmost areas of Canada.
North Atlantic travel and exploration consists of four major locations: Iceland, Greenland, Helluland (likely the island of Baffin in far northern Canada) and Vinland (modern Newfoundland).
Travelers to North America would have been coming from Iceland (the major North Atlantic settlement area) and Greenland (much less well settled and abandoned by the 14th century).
And now on to the food. Fish, fish, and fish would have been a primary food source. Some fresh, much of it salted and preserved. Blubber and whale meat are a possibility as well (though they probably would not have actively whaled during their voyages). Meat (seal and caribou especially if coming from Greenland), salted or even fresh. Also sea-birds. For a particularly amusing glimpse of what things might have looked like, check out this (admittedly very blurry) video of a reenactment of a voyage from Ireland to America, in which a fellow is picked up solely for his ability to catch birds and fish.
They would also have had livestock, pigs, sheep, and perhaps even cattle, that could be fresh slaughtered but would ideally have been kept for secondary production (cheese, milk, wool etc.). We know from archaeological remains and from patterns of settlement westward that these voyages would have included both men and women and thus probably were supplied with the necessary goods (including farm animals) to at least begin settlement. This means that they might also have had cereal for planting and cultivation.
It is best to think of the voyagers to America and the North Atlantic as rather distinct from the "Vikings" most famous for raiding England, Ireland and Francia in the 9th century. These are not bands of warriors looking to make money and head back home to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. They are explorers and above all settlers, looking for new lands and new opportunities.
Sources: The first and best place to go is The absurdly large edited volume, The Viking World which has several articles on North Atlantic settlement and travel, all of which have bibliographies.
Happy reading!
they were starving to death because there was no food, no water, no buildings, and no society.
https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-World/dp/125003356X
Absolutely, it was just a case of opening my mouth before engaging my brain.
If anyone wants some more information on it though I've recently finished a book called A Line in The Sand by James Barr that's based on the most recent documents that have surfaced. If that's a little dry for you there's a Podcast called Martyr Made that does a really good job of explaining the Israeli Palestinian conflict and why it's still going on.
Ah, here we are - it's "A Frozen Hell" by Trotter: http://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496
It's been a while since I read it, so I may have some of the details wrong, but I think the basics are right.
Well, they did have a technological advantage in the form of viking longships. These ships were long, shallow bottomed, flexible ships that were both graceful as well as being some of the fastest ships in the viking's geological sphere of influence. They were highly efficient in the sea as well as in the small rivers and fjords of Scandinavia and their shallow hulls allowed them to travel up mainland rivers, even reaching as far as Paris, France before the end of the viking age. The ships also allowed for long, fast voyages along coasts carrying vikings as far from Scandinavia as Italy, Turkey, Russia, North Africa and Canada.
Another piece of the reason they were so successful was that they often targeted under-manned monasteries, churches and small villages. 8th to 12th century England was not united by any means; you had North Umbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex and all the smaller states within those areas that were not always at peace with each other, requiring fighting forces that were not seen to be as needed on the north and northeast coasts of England and modern Scotland.
Now we come to combining these two factors in viking tactics. Vikings were raiders, at least in the beginning, and were not setting out to conquer lands and steal fortifications as in your typical medieval battle. They use a hit-and-run style of raiding that left their victims little to no time to call for aid. They would spend their winters at home preparing their ships, weapons and bodies for the summer raids and after the spring crops had been planted they were off in search of the most plunder they could bring back with the smallest amount of risk involved. To a viking, it didn't matter if you were a soldier or a monk, if they engaged you in a fight and you lost, they were entitled to what you owned as they considered this a fair fight. So, in that way, they may have also had a psychological advantage as well. Other monks and god-fearing men heard account of these ruthless demons (some letters from monks who escaped the vikings survive these encounters) and fear and infamy about them spread through the British isles.
If you’re interested in further reading I highly recommend “The Viking World” https://www.amazon.com/Viking-World-Routledge-Worlds/dp/0415692628
If you’re interested in reading a letter written about the vikings by a monk whose monastery was attacked by vikings, Yale has an online transcription available here: https://classesv2.yale.edu/access/content/user/haw6/Vikings/higbald.html
Since I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the questions right now, I'm going to copy and paste two answers I've given to similar question in earlier threads. (One of which is a copy-and-paste job itself.)
1. General books:
I'm going to copy and paste an answer I once gave to someone who asked me for book recommendations via private message.
>Hi there!
>No Problem! Always glad to help. If you need a quick overview over the topic or are rather unfamiliar with it The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings gives a good first impression. Else Roesdahl's The Vikings is a bit more in depth but with less pictures. There's also Peter Sawyer's Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings. All three of those are slightly outdated but they give a great first impression of the Age. If money's thight, start with Sawyer, then Roesdahl, then the atlas.
>If you want to go more in depth there's The Viking World by Stefan Brink and Neil Price. Do not confuse it with the book of the same name by Graham-Campbell and Wilson, which is rather outdated. This "Viking World" is a collection of essays by the world's leading experts on the period an the de facto standard of the discipline at the moment. It's well worth the price.
>If you are (or at least read) German (which is possible from your username) try to get the current catalogue of the Haithabu museum. It gives a good overview over that important trading settlement. Or even better: visit there! (Or any of the large Scandinavian National Museums (Moesgård, Statens Historiska museet, or the Viking ship museums in Roskilde and Oslo, respectively).
>If you are interested in the world of the sagas you can't go wrong with Jesse Byock's Viking Age Iceland.
>If you are looking for a quick ressource or if you have a specific question there's the site of The Viking Answer Lady. She appears to be a reenactor not a scholar but her answers are very well sourced and I have yet to find a major error on her site. Or you can always ask me/post to AskHistorians...
>cheers, wee_little_puppetman
Also, you might want to check out this huge annotated Viking movie list.
There's also a rather good three part BBC series on the Vikings on Youtube.
And for some quick Viking fun there's the animated short The Saga of Biorn.
Oh, one more thing: You might also enjoy Viking Empires by Angelo Forte, Richard Oram and Frederik Pedersen. It goes beyond the traditional end of the Viking Age into the Middle Ages and should therefore tie in nicely to your main interest in the crusades.
2. Sagas
Egils saga and Njáls saga are usually the ones that are recomennded for first time readers. They feel very modern in their narrative structures. Grettis saga is also quite good for a start. And then maybe Laxdæla saga. If you aren't specifically interested in Iceland and want to start with something that conforms more to the public picture of "Vikings" try Eiriks saga rauða, Jómsvíkinga saga or Sverris saga. But afterwards you have to read at least one Icelander saga (i.e. one of the ones I mentioned first)!
Icelandic sagas are fascinating but you have to commit to them. Don't be disappointed if a chapter begins with two pages of the family tree of a minor character! And always keep in mind that this is medieval literature: although it might look like it it is not history. These things were written in the 12th to 14th centuries, even if the take place much earlier!
> before the Church plunged Europe into the Dark Ages
If by the "Church" you mean the "collapse of the Western Roman Empire partly due to invasion and raiding" and by "plunged" you mean "precipitated the slow decline of the infrastructure of the society" and by the "Dark Ages" you mean the "Early Middle Ages" then there are plenty of history books, a good overview one is Europe: A History or for a wider view History: From the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day.
Read The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Anthony Beevor. Covers most of what you're asking about and a very entertaining read.
TLDR: as General von Blumenthal, Chief of Staff of the Prussian I Army, put it about the austro-prussian war of 1866, ‘we just shoot the poor sods dead.’ This is repeated all over from Frederick the Great till unification of Germany.
read : Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947
Start with The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey. It's a great read and it will introduce you to a lot of concepts of the early middle ages in a fun and very informative way.
Then I'd move on to books by Joeseph and Frances Gies, particularly Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, and Life in a Medieval Village (the last one being my personal favorite, although village life is especially interesting to me). You really can't go wrong with any Gies books though, so if one catches your eye, go for it.
Then, when you're ready to go into further depth, move onto the books of G. G. Coulton. They were mostly written in the early 20th century so they can be a little dry, but holy smokes the guy was an erudite medievalist, and many authors and researchers owe a lot to him.
BONUS: If, like me, you become interested in the village life aspect of the middle ages, there are some primary documents that you can find online too. I recommend at least The Rules of Robert Grosseteste, Seneschaucie, and Robert of Henley's Husbandry (I don't know what that site is, it was just the first one that came up on my search results).
> And when per-capita and demographics still result in the US standing out with ten times more school shootings than the rest of the world
Again, it depends on what you compare to what, that's certainly not true for the US vs. Europe.
> Also, "previously disarmed" would imply that these people were ever armed in the first place, which they weren't.
Sure....
The reason to "bring up hitler" is that there's demonstrated costs to disarming a people, the same Leftists who want to disarm the US people murdered a bare minimum of 100 million previously disarmed innocents in the 20th Century (for China, look up rifle taxes). If you consider the *National*sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei to be of the Left, as they certainly claimed to be, then quite a few more.
ADDED: I also bring up Hitler because of Austrians like [REDACTED] had any shame, they'd shut up about gun control for at least a few more generations. FURTHER ADDED: it appears he has some shame, he deleted his entire comment.Oops, Australians speak English, not Austrian.Well you can read the rest of the wikipedia article if you like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War
Or you could go read the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496
But in the end, the Finns did amazingly well, avoided outright defeat and gave Russia a very public bloody nose. However, they didn't win. If they'd kept fighting, Russia would have defeated them absent strong Allied intervention.
nice to hear, Finland is a country that the devs really need to get around to updating. If you need some help for the winter war stuff, look up a book called Frozen Hell. Very good on the finnish winter war
Yes; Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, & Israel (don't get me started on that one) were created or given independence post WW2 by Britain & France (who previously controlled many of them)
There's a good book about this and the years preceding .
Depends on how much in-depth you want them to be, and if you're more into 'general politics', or into 'military-related affairs'.
For really good understanding of how Syria came into being, and what events and processes shaped it early on, you might want to read:
Given your German flag, you might add
Now, since much of recent Syrian history is dominated by the Syrian military, you might need some read in this regards. Ideally, there would be an English translation for the best - most detailled, most in-depth - book on history of Syrian armed forces, Pesach Malovany's big volume tittled something like 'Out of the North an Evil shall break Forth' (sorry, all the links I used to have to its publisher are down) - published (like, sigh, so many really good Israeli books on Arab-Israeli wars) in Hebrew only. But there is none. Word is that this might get translated to English by the University of Kentucky, sometimes next or the year after.
Some might suggest you Arabs at War. Regardless how comprehensive, when it comes to Syria I find it hopelessly obsolete, onesided and largely based on 'battlefield heritage' (see: hear-say). Indeed, although anything than 'Syria-related', I found Egyptian Strategy for the Yom Kippour War much more useful for studying the Syrian military during the October 1973 War (and even after!).
Namely, that one is largely based on Egyptian documentation captured during the October 1973 War, and cross-examination of related Egyptian and Syrian military literature.
A 'short-cut' of sort (i.e. avoiding collecting all of these books) would be to go for the Arab MiGs books... though this is in turn an own series of six volumes, covering the history of Arab air forces at war with Israel in period 1955-1973.
Good thing about these books is that they're based on hundreds of interviews, authentic publications (including several by top Syrian military commanders), and whatever documentation the authors managed to get. They're providing really unique insights: far from merely counting aircraft, describing their markings, or discussing claims, they're descibing political backgrounds, arms deals, training (including outright fist-fights between top Syrian pilots and Soviets supposed to instruct them), organization, tactics, weaponry, foreign influences (in the case of Syrians, this was foremost Czechoslovak and not 'Soviet' by nature, and in this regards these books are well-supported by - between others - loads of original documentation from Czech National Archives) etc.
Finally, re. causes of the SCW: there is meanwhile a small myrad of related titles - with best example probably being a quite massive volume titled The Syrian Jihad: al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency. Where that title 'excells' is in showing 'local influence and flair' of the entire affair: in turn, that is often making it hard to follow. Right now, I wouldn't know a 'simplier', 'easier to follow' volume describing this affair, though (any recommendations are most welcome).
Clandestines is good, although its nonfiction: http://www.akpress.org/2006/items/clandestines
days and nights of love and war (not to be confused with the crimething book) is good as well, also nonfiction: http://www.amazon.com/Days-Nights-Love-Eduardo-Galeano/dp/1583670238
Homage to catalonia (spanish civil war by george orwell): http://www.amazon.com/Homage-Catalonia-George-Orwell/dp/0156421178
hmm, sorry, can't think of any 'fiction' off the top of my head though. If i do think of any i'll message you.
Also worth looking at Castles of Steel
That and Dreadnought by the same author are my favorites of the era.
Although he is known for his paintings (besides, you know, World War II), Hitler had a passion for architecture.
He even once said that "If Germany had not lost [World War I], [He] would have not got involved in politics and would have been a great architect, some kind of Michelangelo"
According to Albert Speer (architect and friend of Hitler's), architecture was his favorite passion.
He even modified the final plans for the operas of Cologne and Linz.
Several times, some of the works given to Speer were done from drafts made by Hitler.
Sources:
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich
Guyot & Restellini, L'art Nazi (in French)
Edit: typos
I didn't mention the Chart because I thought it was necessary to provide some evidence that anything on Jim Walker's personal web page is much more accurately described as "biased and inaccurate" than "objective and trustworthy"; I just would have been remiss not to mention his most noteworthy accomplishment in the art of bullshit. Sure, Hitler said the things that Walker attributes to him in Mein Kampf, and in that one speech which is so frequently quoted without mention of the fact that it is a rhetorical reversal of a political opponent's speech that had cited "my feelings as a Christian" as a motive for opposing anti-Semitism—and because Walker, like many of his fellow atheists, is afraid to face the facts about Hitler's relation to religion, he takes these quotes at face value, without critically analysing them in the light of other information from the Table Talk, or from Goebbels' diaries, or from Speer's memoirs. It seems that Hitler's honesty is not to be doubted, and that this is more than one can say for Barack Obama. Indeed, though Walker quote-mines Inside the Third Reich for proof that the persecution of Christianity was conducted by Bormann without Hitler's knowledge, he silently overlooks inconvenient testimony like this:
> In Bormann's mind, the Kirchenkampf, the campaign against the churches, was useful for reactivating party ideology which had been lying dormant. He was the driving force behind this campaign, as was time and again made plain to our round table. Hitler was hesitant, but only because he would rather postpone this problem to a more favorable time. Here in Berlin, surrounded by male cohorts, he spoke more coarsely and bluntly than he ever did in the midst of his Obersalzberg entourage. "Once I have settled my other problems," he occasionally declared, "I'll have my reckoning with the church. I'll have it reeling on the ropes." (p. 123)
If you want to know something about history, read a history book, not apologetics web sites.
http://www.amazon.com/Homage-Catalonia-George-Orwell/dp/0156421178/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1415647913&sr=1-1&keywords=homage+to+catalonia
I believe targets in a conflict are often the best indication of motives but there are other factors. The nature of many provisional-IRA civilian attacks involved bombings, many of which targeted business in an attempt to cripple the economy of Northern Ireland. These bombings were often pre-warned so many of the actual attacks had few casualties and only destroyed infrastructure. Of course this was not a perfect war plan, mistakes were made that lead to the deaths of hundreds of civilians one of the most disgusting atrocities of the troubles was the omagh bomb 1998 killing 29 people. A confusion in the RIRAs warning lead to the police forces directing people towards the bomb instead of away from it. Another atrocity from the IRA was the Eniskillen bombing, 11 civilians killed at a WW1 remembrance service, IRA claimed that it was targeting the army there. A theme of attack on military personnel and Infrastructure would suggest a more militaristic campaign that the IRA had been fighting since the 1910's.
Loyalists on the other hand were not in the same type of war, they were not fighting an 'Invasive Force' and many of the casualties were from within their own organisation they killed twice as many Loyalist as republican paramilitaries due to internal disputes. The atrocities they are well known for are the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, un-warned at rush hour with 33 deaths. The Shankill butchers, a gang of murders who abducted, tortured and killed at least 23 civilians in the most horrific ways possible. And a rogue gun-man 'Michael Stone' who attacked a cemetary during a funeral of 3 IRA members who were killed (Unarmed) by the SAS in Gibraltar. Stone killed three funeral attendants with grenades.
Of corse the lines defining Military organisation, paramilitary and thug or gangster are heavily blurred and many people will disagree with the points I have raised. Generally the republican paramilitaries had a more cohesive front with military experience from earlier days. The loyalist attacks seemed more sporadic, and down to the actions of gangs like the butchers or gunmen like stone.
Make your own conclusions, read Wikipedia on all the topics I mentioned if you want to go further Brian Feeney, Alvin Jackson, Dairmaid Ferriter, AJP Taylor have spent decades of research on the Troubles a good book for a start is http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Troubles-Northern-Conflict/dp/024196265X
Very much enjoyed Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama . Very readable. Was my first foray into reading about the French Rev. so I don't have a lot to compare it to, but it was quite informative and engaging.
Have you read Gulag yet?
It's hard to take those casualty estimates in the above link seriously. First off, they are all from Russian sources (only one Finnish one, and that one a low figure compared to other Finnish estimates I've seen). Note too how close they are to the official Soviet figure - which was released when the Russians were desperate to downplay their humiliation in Finland and how unprepared the Red Army was for war.
It's rare to find a conflict where casualty figures vary so widely but that has a lot to do with the Soviets suppressing the magnitude of their disaster in Finland. The Finns conservatively estimated Russian dead at 200,000. The Soviets claimed it was 48,000 but no one believed it at the time. Khrushchev, in his memoirs, claimed they lost a million men in Finland but that figure must have included wounded, captured and missing and was probably an exaggeration. I've read that the Germans estimated Russian losses as over 300,000 dead. Whatever they were, they were horrendous, even by Soviet standards. I can well imagine it was 3 to 4 times what they admitted at the time so an estimate of 200,000 killed sounds about right.
BTW, the best English language account I've read of the war is William Trotter's "A Frozen Hell" if you're interested to learn more.
Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303855605&sr=8-1
Although the first instinct is to blame Cold War era propaganda, based on evidence available, it seems that Soviet troops were responsible for instances of mass rap and other atrocities towards the end of the war. Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin is a great resource for information regarding this. Naturally, the Russians often protest these accusations, not wishing to tarnish their perceived valor during their Great Patriotic War. Often many Soviet veterans will claim that those responsible for the atrocities were the undisciplined lower echelon units who brought up the rear for the elite front line troops.
Before total condemnation is handed down, one very important thing should be remembered; Neither the Americans nor the British had to endure German invasion or occupation. Therefore, their respective troops had less motivation to commit brutal acts of reprisal against the German people. The Russians, on the other hand, suffered immensely when the Germans directly attacked their homeland. No other Allied country (with the Chinese at a close second) sustained as many casualties during the war. The Germans saw the Russians as sub-human, and they were treated brutally. Even when the tide turned and the Germans were being pushed out of Russia, they operated a “scorched earth” policy, destroying anything that could be useful to their enemy as they retreated, including entire towns and villages.
Naturally, when Soviet troops suddenly found themselves in enemy territories, they enacted what, to them, was justified retribution against the many crimes the Germans had inflicted upon them. Added to this was the outrage that Soviet soldiers felt upon witnessing the relatively comfortable European living conditions (large houses, indoor plumbing and other middle to upper class niceties). Many Soviet troops were simple peasants of very modest means before the war, and were angered as to why the enemy instigated an expansionist war when they lived with such plenty and prosperity, leading to mass lootings. These acts of revenge, as well as the propaganda highlighting the “savagery” of the Soviet “horde,” are why so many German troops preferred surrender to the Western Allies.
It should be noted that not all Soviet troops behaved this way, and some did treat the defeated population with humanity. The Soviet high command did take steps to stop the atrocities, and threatened to shoot any serious offenders. Cases of rape did continued, however, until the end of 1947 when Soviet authorities finally segregated the occupying troops from the local population into guarded military camps and bases.
Not from my country, but relevant to this sub - Postwar by Tony Judt.
I can give you a short list of personal favorites, books that I consider both informative and extremely interesting / entertaining to read. As you'll see I prefer memoirs and eyewitness accounts to sweeping historical overviews of the war.
With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge. Personal memoir of the author's experience as a marine machine gunner in the Pacific war, specifically the campaigns on Peleliu and Okinawa. Sledge is a marvelous writer with prose I'd describe as "Hemingwayesque", a real compliment. Grueling, appalling, human, his account does a great job of sketching in the personalities of his fellow marines.
"The Good War": An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel. This is the book that World War Z is aping, but the actual book is a far more gripping read. Terkel sat down for personal interviews with 121 survivors of the war, Germans, Japanese, British, Canadian as well as American.
Band Of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose. Now made famous by the TV series, the story of E Company's recruitment, training and ultimate combat experience during and after the Normandy invasion is as intense and eye-opening as it sounds.
Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, Leo Marks. Marks was a cryptographer working in London for the SOE (special operations executive, the group responsible for running much of "The Resistance" throughout occupied Europe, North Africa and Asia). He's a very funny guy, a self-professed coward, but the book portrays his deeply heartfelt concern for the well-being of the agents he was sending behind enemy lines. His codes, and methods of transmitting them, could be the only thing saving them from capture by the Gestapo. All too often, they weren't enough. "If you brief an agent on the Tuesday and three days later his eyes are taken out with a fork, it hastens the aging process," he writes.
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor. When you start to read about the Eastern Front, you realize that much of the conventional western perspective of WWII in Europe is based on the comparatively minor engagements in Italy and France. France lost 350,000 civilians to the war, The Soviet Union lost 15-20 million. Considered purely from the POV of total casualties and total armed forces committed, WWII was primarily an engagement between Germany and the Soviet Union throughout Eastern Europe, with a number of smaller actions in the western countries. Anyhow, the story of the brutal, grinding siege of Stalingrad, the point where the German tide definitively turned, is a must-read.
Homage To Catalonia, George Orwell. This is Orwell's personal account of his service fighting on the Republican side against fascists during the Spanish Civil War from 1936-37. Basically, this was the war before the war, as described by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Incidentally Hemingway's novel For Whom The Bell Tolls is a fairly accurate, very powerful portrayal of a different view of the same war.
I'm English but got an interest in Ireland as my city has lots of Irish people and was the only mainland city to elect a pro independence MP, and like most people here I have Irish grandparents and will probably get an Irish passport soon. It honestly depends who you ask, I've met northern Irish people who are adamant that they are British, others who don't believe in Northern Ireland and refer to it as 'the north of Ireland' and Irish people who don't care as long as there isn't violence. I've started reading this book which is fantastic https://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Troubles-Northern-Conflict/dp/024196265X
Really impartial and gives both sides views but tried to remain neutral and just give out the facts. I highly recommend it.
Read, read, and read some more.
A decent popularly-accessible book on life in the later "dark ages" would be The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey. He addresses everything from daily life, to the agricultural cycle, to health and medicine all in a short and easy read.
Now that's for England in the late 10th century. The fads, superstitions, and culture would be different in, say, southern France or Silesia.
As for a little theory-crafting:
Your house would be a single room, made of a timber frame and walled with wattle-and-daub. The thatch making up the roof would be replaced every couple years or so (a more efficient way of doing this wouldn't be invented until the 14th century), and the floor of bare earth covered with a thick layer of rushes that were swept out and replaced periodically.
You wake up at dawn lying on the floor. You have no bed to speak of, but the rushes are comparably soft and warm, and your woolen blanket soft and comfortable. You complain to your wife that it might be time to change the fleabane hanging from the walls, as you think a couple might have gotten in to your blankets. She rolls her eyes at your grousing and prods at the small fire in the center of the single room. The smoke rises to the rafters and slowly leaks out through a vent on one side.
Your children rise groggily and rub their eyes as you wash your face, arms, hands, and chest with water from a pottery basin and ewer. You change your linen undershirt and briaes (sort of like loose boxer shorts) and pull on your long, woolen tunic. You've had it for a long time, and the once more vibrant orange-red color, dyed with madder, has begun to fade.
You instruct your middle child to empty the chamber pots while you head outside to relieve yourself. After you finish, you give your younger children their final reprimands to do their chores, feel the forehead of your youngest and fret she's feeling feverish, fetch your single ox, kiss your wife, and head for the fields. Your eldest son accompanies you. Though he is still young, he will be assigned to keep the birds away from the freshly-planted seed with stones and sticks.
It's early spring, and that means plowing. You meet with the other men of the manner and work together to plow your fields. you have been assigned a couple narrow strips in a couple different fields, as has everyone else. Whatever you can grow in these furrows is yours. In addition to your own land, you and your neighbors also work the land of your lord. It's a two-way relationship--you work his land and he lays on feasts and provides certain resources. If times are hard, he's required to feed you. Last year, the harvest was bad and several freemen from the surrounding came to your lord and voluntarily submitted themselves to him in exchange for food. They now number amongst your neighbors.
You work all morning with the other men plowing long, narrow furrows into the earth and scattering seeds for the yearly crop of wheat or barley. You break at midday for your first meal of the day, a thick pottage of long-boiled vegetables thickened with barley and edible greens. You drink a weak ale or water (you're away from the cities--the water is as clean as it gets).
You work all afternoon, chatting and gossiping with the others. Your wife is at home grinding wheat and barley, tending the fire, cooking your meal, spinning wool into yarn, gathering vegetables from the fields surrounding, and wash the family's linen undergarments. Your children help to their abilities, take care of the animals, fetch water, and play.
In the evening, your chat, play, sing, eat, drink, and pray. When night falls, you strip off your woolen outer layers, maybe change to fresh linens, and curl up in your blankets next to your wife on the floor. Tomorrow is a Sunday, and that means church. The next day is a feast day, and that also means church, as well as some merryment with your neighbors.
You grow different crops at different times of year. You have all sorts of superstitions about how to get the best crop yields, how to stay healthy, how to avoid trouble--some work; some don't. Religion is not really something you even think about--it's just a part of daily life. You've never in your entire life met anyone with beliefs other than that of "christian," though you've heard tell of lands beyond.
If you get sick, there are prayers and home remedies a plenty. You're too poor to afford one of the school-trained doctors, of which there are a few, who study the old Greek and Roman arts of medicine.
If you're badly injured, there are amputations, trepanning, and setting of broken bones.
If we're in England, in times of trouble, you would not be called up to fight in the Fyrd (closest modern term would be "militia"). That was for the freemen. If you were a freeman, you would be required to own a shield and spear and to turn up with both plus personal provisions when your lord orders, or pay a hefty fine.
If you are wronged, justice was local, with the community taking care of most of the judgement and the lord acting as arbiter if necessary. The Saxon-era English had a rather ingenious system of fines for various offences, including set rates for loss or damage of body parts (teeth included).
How cool! Perhaps i'll have to use reddit as a "free stuff!" place in the future. Especially since I have two copies of the same book, though it was over-zealous Half-Price book-ing. Bought one while in Austin, read another book first, while visiting family in Ft Worth, bought it again because it was a bargain book and I thought I'd never bought it. Oops.
(It's this book )
I am glad that you referenced Roger's book. His related book, The Safeguard of the Sea, looks at Britain's (England's, Wessex's, etc.) navy from 660-1649 and is also an excellent read.
If you don't mind, I would expand on your comment to say this: One of the major arguments that both books make is that a major contributor to Britain's naval success was also the bureaucracy that grew up around the Navy. We tend to think of bureaucracy in negative terms today, but in having a regularized, systemic way of casting and distributing guns and ordnance; building and repairing ships; victualling ships; and manning ships, the British navy was far ahead of its competitors, even by the time of the Armada.
It's also worth pointing out that Britain's naval strength was helped by the establishment of dockyards, drydocks, and associated naval "bases" (although that's an anachronistic term) in various places, including the Thames and Portsmouth but also in other places along England's coast. Not to put too fine a point on it, but wooden ships rot, and regular maintenance was a major reason why Britain was able to keep up its naval strength.
This moves a bit past OP's timeframe, but allow me to recommend two other books by Robert K. Massie, that specifically look at the Anglo-German naval race in the run-up to World War I:
http://www.amazon.com/Dreadnought-Robert-K-Massie/dp/0345375564
http://www.amazon.com/Castles-Steel-Britain-Germany-Winning/dp/0345408780/ref=la_B000AQ6XVE_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1370812631&sr=1-6
You will get more out of them without question, but is that "more" worth the effort? I don't think so, unless you want to really nerd out and/or pursue the subject academically. Get some good, recent translations by folks like Jackson Crawford or Carolyne Larrington. And then if you are still looking to squeeze some "more" out of the texts, go get some good, thorough introductive litterature to contextualize the sagas and poems you are reading, like The Vikings, A Handbook to Eddic Poetry, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, The Viking World etc.
And this is coming from someone who do know Old Norse.
There's lots! Of course, that means it's sometimes hard to pick out highly specialized articles from more general updates on the state of the field, which I suspect is what you're going for. Don't get daunted if this seems too dense; sometimes it's just good to know a bit about what's out there.
As a starting point, I'd recommend taking a look at Brink and Price, eds., The Viking World (2008) [Amazon link so you can preview the table of contents]. I'd start with the introduction (it's short), then technology and trade, and then urbanism or any other sections that seem necessary for you.
An older book, but one that's still very influential is Hodges and Whitehouse's Muhammad, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe (1983). It will give you a good idea of what scholars think was happening, but there's been a lot of research and updates to it over the last 30 years. Before you cite Hodges and Whitehouse, I'd cross reference it with a more recent work, using the table of contents or index to focus your reading. In particular, I'd look at Skre's Means of Exchange (2007) (see especially Skre's intro and conclusion as well as Kilger's "Kaupang from Afar") and McCormick's Origins of the European Economy (2001). They're both great works, but based on how you described your project, I wouldn't risk getting stuck in a quagmire trying to read them both all the way through.
Finally, there's a few terrific articles that should be read if you can:
I've been re-listening to my Citizens audiobook. A good summary of the French Revolution and the Terror, of which Marat was a guiding hand.
I like this take on the painting because it slyly copies David's Death of Marat from a different angle!
Making Sense of the Troubles is probably the most comprehensive and even-handed book about NI
Love the costumes. All that armor! I doubt every part of it as being historically accurate, but it is such fun to watch. I really need to give A World Lit Only By Fire a reread. I remember it being a good sum up of this time period, but it has been a few years.
A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester was incredible. It was like he took my AP European history class, and made it interesting. A wonderful account of how we stumbled upon the renaissance.
I’d highly recommend Robert Massie’s Castles of Steel for an excellent overview of the naval conflict of WWI. He goes into great detail about the ramifications of the submarine campaign and how it ultimately pulled America into the war.
Previous to WWI, commerce raiding was done by well-armed ships which would force a merchantman to stop, board, determine its nationality, pull off the crew, and then scuttle the ship. Initially, submarines attempted to follow this model. Unfortunately, they had no space or crew to detain potentially hostile passengers and enemy crews. Furthermore, they were extremely fragile things and, once the British began using Q ships (merchantmen with naval crews and hidden guns), the Germans could no longer risk surfacing and engaging with gunfire.
These factors, compounded with the problem of identifying a ship’s (possibly fake) flag from a dim periscope a few feet above the waves lead the Germans to declare the entire North Sea a battle zone in which any ship of any nationality might be fired upon. It was this factor, which America saw as an unjust abrogation of its rights as a neutral, combined with the loss of American lives and ships from the submarine campaign that drew the nation into the war.
That is awesome! I'm currently reading "Castles of Steel" on my Kindle so any photos in the book don't really turn out. But this is great. It's incredible to see the Imperial German fleet all together like this.
Doesn't make him a bad guy. His book Inside The Third Reich is fascinating.
I'm not a historian, but I used to be a history teacher and I think I got a few things right in terms of keeping people interested. A few books I used that are fun and relatively easy:
The Battle for Spain by Anthony Beevor is considered the definitive, modern single volume history of this conflict.
Beevor is renowned for his justifiably famous books Stalingrad, D-Day and The Fall of Berlin.
He fought for POUM in the Spanish civil war, which was a marxist, communist political party and fought alongside the anarchist CNT.
Homage to Catalonia gives a lot of insight into the Spanish civil war (a war I knew very little about)- it's a very good book.
Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict is a pretty fair examination of the conflict. As someone else said, you'd probably be as well to read about stuff from the start of the 20th century and even earlier to get a real sense of it, but the above book is a decent one to get into the meat of the conflict.
I spent the last year learning about The Troubles in Prof. Ian McBride's class at King's College London.
For a complete overview of the conflict, it doesn't get much better than Making Sense Of The Troubles by David McKittrick and David McVea. An astonishingly good read and it helped me a lot throughout last year.
For the best book on the IRA themselves, it has to be Richard English's Armed Struggle. Very in-depth, but in my opinion no better study exists.
I've seen Peter Taylor's Trilogy posted here too. I've only read 'Brits', but it was excellent so probably worth checking the others out.
If you're studying the conflict feel free to shoot me a PM as I haven't forgetten everything about it (yet).
"Making Sense of the Troubles" by David McKittrick seemed pretty even-handed and comprehensive to me.
Amazon link
I've still yet to read it (my reading list backlog is massive right now), but David McKittrick's Making Sense of the Troubles was recommended to me a few years ago by a friend as being a very in depth but accessible account of The Troubles and the lead up to the present era.
https://www.amazon.com/Year-1000-First-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579
Yes, there's a big distinction. Here's a link that scratches the surface of dreadnought background & development to get you started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_(1906)
If you get really curious, here's two books that round out the subject of how dreadnoughts fit into naval history...
http://www.amazon.com/Dreadnought-Robert-K-Massie/dp/0345375564/ref=la_B000AQ6XVE_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406314026&sr=1-6
http://www.amazon.com/Castles-Steel-Britain-Germany-Winning/dp/0345408780
The German Confederation was created as a replacement for the Holy Roman Empire, and built on the same lines. The portion of Prussia you are talking about, called Ducal Prussia, is not actually part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was originally polish before falling under the principality of Brandenburg and eventually separating from Polish vassalage. Due to weird legalities, the Prince of Brandenburg eventually added the tittle of King in Prussia (Only the King of Bohemia was allowed to be both a king and a member of the Holy Roman Empire, so the Prince of Brandenburg was circumventing this rule by becoming king in territory technically outside the HRE.) Eventually people just started calling the Prince of Brandenburg the King of Prussia, but the territory was never brought in the HRE because of this technicality. When the lines of the Confederation were drawn they maintained this distinction.
Most of this info come from Iron Kingdom which is a great read, but you probably don't want to read 700 pages to answer a small question.
Then do this one
before you go, try to read 'Savage Continent' by Keith Lowe
i guess i would recommend it to anyone, but if you're travelling particularly to Germany, I would think it would be especially enlightening. It's probably available at any decent-sized public library. It describes how, after the end of the war, some concentration camps were re-opened and a virulent anti-semitism re-arose, among other things. I always think it's really enlightening to know the history you're walking through when you travel, and this is a history no one seems to truly know about.
from an editorial review:
>The end of World War II in Europe is remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, but the reality was quite different. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed, and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted—such as police, media, transport, and local and national government—were either entirely absent or compromised. Crime rates soared, economies collapsed, and whole populations hovered on the brink of starvation.. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent where individual Germans and collaborators were rounded up and summarily executed, where concentration camps were reopened, and violent anti-Semitism was reborn. In some of the monstrous acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands. Savage Continent is the story of post–war Europe, from the close of the war right to the establishment of an uneasy stability at the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is the chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post–World War II Europe for years to come
Get him some interesting ammo, you should be able to find at least four or five different varieties to test out, both commercial and surplus, if you go to a gun show. Maybe get him a book to provide some history relevant to use of the Mosin Nagant rifle, i thought this one was interesting https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543462642&sr=8-1&keywords=a+frozen+hell. It’s not as much inside baseball as some military history.
I think it's time you read up on the Soviet Union, bub.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardakh
https://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400034094/
Edit: I should clarify, that while the Soviet Union did not have a vision of one supreme pure race the way the Nazis did, the point is that they did at times attack and purge and persecute people on the basis of their ethnicity.
My ideal Call of Duty would be Call of Duty: The Winter War
A campaign set in the Russo-Finnish War from 1939-1940. A Finnish Army of 40,000 Finns vs. the entire might of the USSR. Even though the Finns would eventually lose the war, they inflicted on the Soviets around 400k casualties by the end of hostilities. If you want to read about a largely unknown David v. Goliath conflict, read William Trotter's "A Frozen Hell" (Probably the best English language account of the war)
https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496
A sample of the insanity:
Ideally, the campaign would be broken up into three parts. A Simo Hayha storyline chronicling his achievements, a storyline following a unit of the elite Finnish ski infantry, and a third storyline following a teenager in the forested Mannerheim line battles of the late conflict.
Shit would be epic and a man can dream...
Well... been reading Gulag, and no, the USSR was crazy terrible place for a human.
It's a very complicated topic. I can't tell you what it's really about. I recently read this book, which was quite interessting and gives a lot of insight towards many of the fundamental roots of the tensions in the region.
But I don't think there is one conclusive answer to why there is currently war there.
> I expect the average American idiot to buy into this nonsense, but Europeans? On average, you're far more informed than the typical American and I was hoping you guys could take the global leadership role since America is being governed by an incompetent orange ape. You can have these dog and pony shows and pat yourselves on the back like you're making a difference but they won't do anything.
maybe. But large scale social change is a slow process and this is a step in the right direction. What do you expect? We magically summon a german army that can slap it's dick on the table and end this shitshow. The US could. But this is at least a small alternative to the military option, even if it's effects are currently minor.
Awesome, he is my favourite football journalist. i highly recommend his book on Barca and Madrid, especially the audiobook which is narrated by Sid himself.
I like Sid Lowe. Quality follow on Twitter and his book Fear and Loathing in La Liga was a pretty good read. Didn't seem a huge fan of Mourinho, but it was certainly a good book. I loved the history in the book of both Spain and the teams. Recommend if anyone is looking for a good summer book, not too dated either.
While this is interesting for its uniqueness, there is a book called "Hitler's Table Talk" that is much more extensive.
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-1941-1944-Conversations/dp/1929631057
I would recommend Europe by Norman Davies
https://www.amazon.com/Europe-History-Norman-Davies/dp/0060974680
I recommend Europe: a History by Norman Davies
He really breaks down the European history in a refreshing manner. Instead of just addressing the great powers, like France, UK, Germany, Spain, etc, he goes in to depth on the lesser known, or at least less written about parts of Europe. Of course, there's plenty of discussion on those powers as well, but it's all put together in a unified tract which in a way makes sense of the calamity that is Europe's shared histories.
Norman Davies' Europe: A History is the best general introduction to European History I've ever read. But "short" it ain't.
This book explains the degree to which we reconstructed Europe, the alternate plan, and some political reasons why we decided to save half your continent from totalitarianism.
This book, p 340-460, details how Christian realists and statesmen like Herbert Hoover turned away from the Morgenthau plan, for moral and spiritual reasons, and instead fed the world and made it fit for living in.
This book destroys your typical European conception of nazi occupation outside the typical France/Ukraine dichotomy and shows how Germans starved Greek families and created orphans so they could have Christmas feasts.
This book is a magisterial account of the European contribution to reconstruction and shows that I'm not some halfwit barbarian that thinks everything in the world comes from my country. It just wouldn't have been possible without the help of my country.
This book documents the degree to which the nazi war machine violated the Hague Conventions of the 1890s and looted all countries under their control. They imposed inflation on France (RKK certificate to civilian -> civilian to bank -> bank to central bank -> central bank to trash can ; print franc), used their soldiers as mules, how they 'purchased' goods in the East etc. Very useful for debunking the 1950s Soviet disinformation that was based on the idea that American administration was bumbling. Did you know we sent them ground corn instead of baguettes, sausage, and free shoes? How incompetent! And if a German lost their home we didn't give them a fully furnished one. How mean-spirited! lol
Read those books or at least four on the reconstruction of Europe and ask me that question again.
Here's a good book that came out in 2000 AD and describes life in England circa 1000 AD.
The Viking World is about as comprehensive of a volume as you could need. There are plenty of sections dealing with women in the Viking world. The work is scholarly but not unapproachable.
I'm no expert in Medieval or Old-Norse studies, however I've do have an interest in it & from some searching on various different aspects of the Vikings I come across these:
The Cambridge History of Scandinavia: Volume 1. Prehistory to 1520 it's a anthological survey book consisting of both historiographical and hagiographical (biographies of saints) primary & secondary sources ranging from prehistory ( before historical events were documented) through to medieval history of Scandinavia. It's quite pricey but definitely worth the money if your serious...
>The first part of the volume surveys the prehistoric and historic Scandinavian landscape and its natural resources, and tells how man took possession of this landscape, adapting culturally to changing natural conditions and developing various types of community throughout the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. The rest - and most substantial part of the volume - deals with the history of Scandinavia from the Viking Age to the end of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (c. 1520). The external Viking expansion opened Scandinavia to European influence to a hitherto unknown degree. A Christian church organisation was established, the first towns came into being, and the unification of the three medieval kingdoms of Scandinavia began, coinciding with the formation of the unique Icelandic 'Free State'.
The History of Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Denmark,Finland and Iceland) is similar to Cambridge History yet significantly cheaper
The Viking World by Stefan Brink & Neil Price is a mid-range anthological book compromising of many articles from various scholars.
>I would really appreciate material that covers linguistics.....philology, morphology and the like
As for the other categories, I would really appreciate some introductory material on archaeology.
This book will probably be the best one for you because it includes all of the above.
Myth and Religion of the North: the Religion Ancient Scandinavia this book is a good overview of the different mythologies before the christianisation of the nordics.
Women in the Viking Age is a good book on the niche subject area of Women roles within the viking age nordics & its various colonies (from Greenland to Russia). Jesch uses various pieces of evidence from archaeological finds, runic inscriptions, historical records & Old Norse literature.
I would also recommend you look into the Icelandic sagas & Eddas. I'd use SagaDB because there are many various different icelandic sagas & in a variety of languages including English, Icelandic & Old Norse. If you'd like to go about learning O.N. you check the Viking Society for Northern Research or check out the books: A New Introduction to Old Norse: I Grammar: 1 or Viking Language 1: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas
If you're interested at all in the presence of the Vikings (and later scandinavians) in Eastern Europe check out Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe
Hopefully this helps if you have any more specific questions don't be afraid to ask :)
The Viking World edited by Stefan Brink in collaboration with Niel Price.
The book is made up of small chapters and articles usually just a few pages long each (all written by respected academics), each of which introduces and explains the main themes you encounter in the study of the Vikings and their world, with bibliographies for further reading.
I can't recommend it enough, it has helped me out even now I am reading for an MA on the Vikings.
Check out the contents page on the preview Amazon offers.
Try the following:
http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Kingdom-Downfall-Prussia-1600-1947/dp/0674031962/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319601019&sr=1-3
A little late but here is another book, written by Speer himself while imprisioned in Spandau. The first half of the book reveals several of the drawings and models of structures visualized for construction after the war.
[Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684829495/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Vm8FDbG8TSQVZ)
If you want to get the perspective of the crusades through the Arabs this is great read.
http://www.amazon.ca/Crusades-Through-Arab-Eyes/dp/0805208984
My favorite remains 'Europe: A History' by Norman Davies, although it's a bit of a brick. It's well written and comprehensible.
It's pretty beefy, but that's because it starts very early in European history. Specifically reading the periods you're interested in would certainly make it look a little less daunting.
Here's a link to the page on Amazon, so you can see what other folks are saying.
http://www.amazon.com/Europe-History-Norman-Davies/dp/0060974680/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318179129&sr=1-1
Just finished [Fall of Berlin] (http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Berlin-1945-Antony-Beevor/dp/0142002801) which is a great account of that period and talks a little about how kids were forced into service in the final days.
Read Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945. The whole thing was a god awful mess.
Two books I enjoyed:
Germany 1945, which is obviously very specific, and Postwar, which is much more wide-ranging and comprehensive.
Postwar, by Tony Judt, is the definitive guide to Europe after 1945. It's over 900 pages, but he has a wonderfully readable and sometimes entertaining style. I can't recommend it enough... even if you don't read every page, it will definitely keep you interested in history.
George Orwell is one of the great nonfiction authors. His work is compelling, beautiful. The first recommended is often Homage To Catalonia, which was his account of the Spanish civil war. It's not quite the story you are seeking, but his writing style is incredibly accessible, and his language and pacing certainly do read as story-like.
Well you've come to the right place, then!
For a cursory treatment of these ideas, like with many ideas, wikipedia is a good starting point.
History of capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Origins_of_capitalism
Enclosure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
History of modern policing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#Early_modern_policing
Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread is kind of the go to introduction to classical anarchism. Its a good book, and it details the relationship between capitalism, the owner class, the working class, and police, as well as discussing alternatives to the our current social configuration: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23428/23428-h/23428-h.htm
The Conquest of Bread is also available as a free audiobook: https://librivox.org/search?title=The+Conquest+of+Bread&author=Kropotkin&reader=&keywords=&genre_id=0&status=all&project_type=either&recorded_language=&sort_order=catalog_date&search_page=1&search_form=advanced
The concepts of biopower and the spectacle are developed by the writers Michel Foucault and Guy Debord respectively. Their writing can be a little dense, but these concepts and their authors have wikipedia pages which make these ideas a little more accessible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectacle_%28critical_theory%29
Also, this is a reading of Debord's Society of the Spectacle laid over a collage of contemporary footage which conveys the concepts discussed. This is a sort of remake of a film Debord himself made in the '70s. Very very cool: https://vimeo.com/60328678
Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) also happens to be an historian and has produced an excellent documentary about medieval Europe. In the first episode he discusses the lives of the peasantry which is somewhat relevant to this discussion. There are certainly aspects of medieval living that I'm not keen to revive. But there is a nugget of gold in that form of life that we've lost in our contemporary context. Anarchists want a return to that sense of autonomy and deep social bonds within communities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTWsUvT8nsw
An Anarchist FAQ is a very thorough, contemporary, and systematized introduction to anarchist ideas: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html
Noam Chomsky's On Anarchism is an accessible introduction to anarchism that focuses on a modern, large-scale, industrial anarchist society that existed in Spain in the 1930s, to illustrate the concepts underpinning anarchist thought. It's a bit of hokey in parts, especially in the little chapter introductions which are just quotes from Q&A sessions with Dr. Chomsky. But if you can get past that, its good: https://www.amazon.com/Anarchism-Noam-Chomsky/dp/1595589104
Chomsky also wrote Manufacturing Consent and Profit Over People, which are much less shallow than On Anarchism, and document how the state maintains a facade of legitimacy and some of the things that the contemporary state (circa 1999... its a little out of date, but not terrible in that respect) does to sophisticate the relationship between owner and worker. Chomsky is probably best known publicly for those two texts, but he has a lot of work in a lot of different fields. He's a pretty prolific intellectual with numerous contributions to political theory, linguistics, cognitive theory, philosophy, and computer science.
Richard Wolff is an economist who has taught at Yale, UMass, City College NY, and is currently teaching at New School. He does a monthly update on global capitalism where he kind of tries to give a bird's eye view of how our global economy shifts and develops from month to month. He also does weekly updates too, but I can never manage to stay up to date on those: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdMCTlHl5RQ&t=1836s
Anthropologist David Harvey's book 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism details many of the ways in which capitalism appears to be constantly fighting against itself for survival, all the while heightening the conditions which cause capitalism to become precarious in the first place: https://www.amazon.com/Seventeen-Contradictions-Capitalism-David-Harvey/dp/0190230851
This is a film about where capitalism is headed, and what it will look like in 2030: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vApEgrLf7S4
Encirclement: Neoliberalism Ensnares Democracy is a documentary which discusses some of the ways that capitalism post-1968 has shifted so as to wrest more power away from communities. Its very similar to Noam Chomsky's Power Over People, and Chomsky is featured prominently alongside several other intellectuals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh44qlii6X4
We Are All Very Anxious is a really cool and short text by anonymous writers about how the different stages of capitalism impact the psychiatric health of the individual. Its availible as a free text, or as a short audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP_5NlY-4mI
This is Albert Einstien's short introductory essay on socialism called Why Socialism. Its not an advocacy of Anarchism per se, and I'm skeptical about the (admitedly vague) path to socialism that he lays out. But some of the concerns he raises at the end of the essay are problems that Anarchism aims to directly address: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
George Orwell (author of 1984 and Animal Farm) spent time living in and fighting for the Spanish Anarchist society that Chomsky focuses on in On Anarchism, and he documents his experiences in his memoir, Homage to Catalonia: https://www.amazon.com/Homage-Catalonia-George-Orwell/dp/0156421178
The Take, by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis is a film that documents a growth of anarchist factories, offices, and communities following the 2001 financial collapse in Argentina. Today these communities still exist and control hundreds of workplaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOCsfEYqsYs
This is a short film about the anarchist nation of Rojava (northern syria, western kurdistan) which formed in 2013 in the midsts of the Syrian civil war, and is currently the primary boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p40M1WSwNk&t=8s
Since the early-mid '90s most of Chiapas, Mexico has operated as an anarchist society in direct defiance of the Mexican government and NAFTA. In addition to providing for their own communities, Chiapas is also the 8th largest producer of coffee in the world. This is a short documentary about that society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HAw8vqczJw&t=2s
This is a children's film about the same people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDNuzFQW3uI&t=463s
Resistencia is a documentary about anarchist communities emerging in Honduras in the wake of the 2009 US-backed coup: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/resistencia
Marx' Capital is a foundational text in modern socialist thought. It lacks some of the cool ideas of the 20th century (a genealogy of morality, the spectacle, and biopower as examples) but is very thorough in providing an economic critique of capitalism. Capital is dense, massive (three volumes long), and incomplete, but David Harvey has a great series of lectures which go along with the texts: http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-01/
This is another pretty dense one, but if you watch that lecture series and/or read Capital, Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy is an interesting follow up text. Carson looks at the plethora of arguments that have developed since the publication of capital which try to recuperate economics to before Marx' critique. In it he discusses and critiques subjective value theory, marginalism, and time preference, which all ultimately argue in different ways that the the prices of goods are determined primarily by demand, rather than the cost of production, a rejection of an important conjecture in classical economics which Marx' critique incorporates. Carson's overarching critique of these responses to Marx and the Marxian approach isn't that these demand-focused understandings of value are entirely wrong or useless, but that as critiques of classical cost theory of value they kind of lose sight of what Marx and the classicals were actually saying. While demand is an important aspect of production, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, etc... are looking at the case where supply and demand have reached equilibrium. While demand may be a determining factor of price where this isn't the case, we know that competitive commodity markets tend towards a supply/demand equilibrium, so an analysis of the equilibrium case is useful for analyzing the form that markets take in the long-term. You can justify small gains through market arbitrage for example, or the way we value art and other unique works by looking at demand, but its not as useful for understanding how someone can see consistent long-term gains through investment: https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MPE.pdf
In this post I provide a summary of some of the ideas that Carson discusses thats not anywhere nearly as thorough as Carson, but isn't quite as condensed as the above paragraph (If you look closely, you'll notice I recycled some of my earlier post from this one): https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/53e0e8/socialists_from_ltv_to_exploitation/d7scmya/
(cont...)
Markets, Not Capitalism by various authors and essayists, collected by The Center for a Stateless Society
Homage to Catalonia by to often quoted and praised yet very much Socialist who wishes he could have joined the Anarchists: George Orwell
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. What? I fucking love The Lord of the Rings. It's probably my favorite book(s) ever. Fine, want to make it political?
-John Rogers
Read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. It's a first-hand account of his time fighting alongside anarchist militia during the Spanish Civil War, and provides some good insight into how anarchists function during a wartime/revolutionary scenario.
I'd recommend this book: Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict by David McKittrick and David McVea. It was my starting point for learning about our history, helped the blinkers fall off.
I actually found this one even more enjoyable than Time Traveler’s Guide. The prose is so charming.
The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World
The Year 1000 - I read this book in my History of England class back in college. It's one of the few books assigned I actually read cover to cover. It's small, easy to read, and packed with interesting info.
We also read The Virgin Queen by Christopher Hibbert, that was a pretty good non-fiction book on Elizabeth I that reads more like a novel.
> http://www.amazon.com/Dreadnought-Robert-K-Massie/dp/0345375564/ref=la_B000AQ6XVE_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406314026&sr=1-6[2]
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Castles-Steel-Britain-Germany-Winning/dp/0345408780[3]
Cannot recommend these books highly enough! Everyone on this sub should read them :)
Robert Massie is my favorite historian, and he has 3 amazing books on the period. Dreadnought, about the Anglo-German naval rivalry that led to WWI, Nicholas and Alexander, a biography of the last Czar and the fall of the Russian Empire, and the beautifully titled Castles of Steel, about the naval battles of WWI.
I have a Time-Life book titled Dreadnought which concentrates on the time period of 1900 thru 1919. At least a couple very large chapters are dedicated to Jutland.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Dreadnoughts-David-Howarth/dp/0809427117
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert K. Massie is also right up your alley. Jutland is the centerpiece of the book.
http://www.amazon.com/Castles-Steel-Britain-Germany-Winning/dp/0345408780
Hvis du vil have det nyeste forskning på området, så vil jeg anbefale The Viking World. Den giver et ganske godt indblik i, hvor lidt vi egentlig ved om vikingetiden og hvor meget det hele er omdiskuteret. Den forholder sig ikke kun til Skandinavien, men også deres virke i Europa og andre steder i verden.
I liked Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark.
Came here looking for Frederick. I'm reading Iron Kingdom now and I'm finding him to be an especially fascinating figure. I think I'll look for a good biography after I'm through with the other book.
I'm only a recently active poster, but I hope to remain so. I just moved and I'm between jobs so I started writing a novel (stave off madness from the job boards) and was looking for some strong critiques. I really like the premise of a semi-enforced give to get critical community, because it helps build the skills of everybody involved.
I was an English major, but also always an avid reader, so my favorite books have a bit of a range (representative not comprehensive):
I'm predisposed to find things I like in almost any piece, but because I can find really great gems I try to be rough on the rough spots. I'm most drawn to anything that is true to life, even in the most fantastical situations.
Simon Schama's Citizens is OK.
Might be a little different than your standard crusade narrative, but The Crusades through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf might be interesting for you. It was presented to me as a counterpoint to a standard, western historical interpretation of the crusades.
I come from no expertise on the subject (besides a college course on Europe in the High Middle Ages) but I picked up Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and found it to be a fascinating read. ]
The author mostly draws from Arab chronicles to build an idea of how contemporary Arabs viewed the events of Crusades. Overall it was refreshing to read about one of the most controversial events in European Medieval history in a book that was almost completely derived from the Arab historiography. By not focusing on European sources and interpretations of the events, it was really interesting seeing the crusaders as this looming alien threat within the Muslim world.
That perspective made it all the more interesting to see how difficult it was for the Arab world to unite against what appeared to be a common threat, and how that political fragmentation allowed for alien European-Christian Kingdoms to exist within the Arab world for so long. Ultimately it was great read for a great vacation!
um, yeah, people did do exactly that.
read: Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of WWII by Keith Lowe.
if you haven't read it, you're really not in a position to comment.
https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-World/dp/125003356X
>n Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent where individual Germans and collaborators were rounded up and summarily executed, where concentration camps were reopened, and violent anti-Semitism was reborn. In some of the monstrous acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands. Savage Continent is the story of post–war Europe, from the close of the war right to the establishment of an uneasy stability at the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is the chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post–World War II Europe for years to come.
This issue is covered in the excellent book Savage Continent by Keith Lowe.
https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-World/dp/125003356X
Plural.
An "assault weapons" (doublespeak for: what the Warsaw Ghetto residents had the right to use) "ban" only of the production & sale of certain guns & parts, nowhere close to the proposed repeating of history of banning possession of all means of effective defense by Holocaust (and other lesser & greater genocides throughout history) victims as they were forced into hell on earth, mass graves.
Keep on Holocaust-denying.
I read A Line in the Sand not too long ago, which covers everything from World War One onwards, and my impression was not that the Israeli's were the good guys, but that the region would probably be more stable had the British not caved in to Zionism.
Of course, we cannot now evict the Israeli's from the region, or at least there is not the will to do so, plus we have a strategic interest in holding them there, some would argue. But they basically lucked out, because many in the West felt it would be a good idea to have a Jewish state. They certainly have less legitimacy over the area than the French have over France.
I always have a few on the go I switch between as the mood takes me. Right now, on kindle, they are:
The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of Sinn Féin and the IRA
A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East
The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer
Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation
in physical formats:
Peadar O'Donnell, Irish Social Rebel
Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-Adolf-Hitler/dp/1929631057
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-1941-1944-Conversations/dp/1929631057
The burden of proof is on you to prove he was a Christian. What churches revere Saint Hitler?
Archives for the links in comments:
----
I am Mnemosyne 2.1, No rest, no unarchived links. No matter the cost. ^^^^/r/botsrights ^^^^Contribute ^^^^message ^^^^me ^^^^suggestions ^^^^at ^^^^any ^^^^time ^^^^Opt ^^^^out ^^^^of ^^^^tracking ^^^^by ^^^^messaging ^^^^me ^^^^"Opt ^^^^Out" ^^^^at ^^^^any ^^^^time
[Here are some excerpts][1] from Hitler's Table Talk, which is probably what he has in mind.
[1]: http://www.davnet.org/kevin/articles/table.html
If you don't mind spending ~$10, it doesn't get much better than Sid Lowe's Fear and Loathing in La Liga. I highly recommend this.
If you're looking for free stuff, here's something that looks interesting from 2012 (PDF). (Although, admittedly, I've never read it).
hahaha, here's the book BB :3
http://www.barcablaugranes.com/2016/3/1/11138978/la-liga-president-javier-tebas-clubs-of-an-independent-catalonia
&
http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-La-Liga-Barcelona/dp/1568584504
My favorite book is Frozen Hell. It's a book on the Finnish-Russian war, how the allies were diplomatically barred from participation, and how the Finns waged a successful war inspite of insurmountable odds.
Edit - I guess I should have read the post more carefully. I don't know about a comprehensive history book. I personally like to delve into smaller portions in detail.
I just finished this, you may want to read it:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Line-Sand-Britain-France-struggle/dp/1847394574
Certainly more complicated than I thought (and I thought I had a good idea).
Sykes-Picot is almost a footnote in what actually happened.
https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-Liga-Barcelona-Greatest/dp/1568584504
lol that's so not true. Here's an entire book on Nazi gun control. It was written by Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer and Research Fellow with the Independent Institute who has argued and won three constitutional law cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
I'm slogging my way through this currently. Either the book is very dense, or I am very dense. The jury is still out.
https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-Liga-Barcelona-Greatest/dp/1568584504
How about A Frozen Hell by William Trotter?
Here's one:
http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/football/28204560
Both teams felt they had signed Di Stefano. Barca handled the signing sloppily, Real won the player after much wrangling in which the dictatorship was a key player.
The other story that comes to mind would be the 11-1 humiliation in the 1943 Spanish cup. At a point of high tension for the rivalry Barca goes up 3-0 in the first leg in Catalonia. Barca arrives in Madrid for the second leg and finds that the fans are in a frenzy possibly allowed to occur by Franco who would have controlled the press. The refs do nothing to calm the atmosphere, items are thrown at players from the stands. At half time, a representative from the military reportedly visited the locker room and suggested that Barca stand down.
Overall though, it seems like the regime had a policy whereas no institution shall challenge the regime for influence and they preferred that no one rock the boat. Claims that Real was "Franco's team" are probably exaggerated along with claims that Barca would have been a shining example of rebellion. History is shades of grey.
This is the feeling I got from reading this book. I don't know much outside of that so I beg forgiveness for my rough understanding.
http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-La-Liga-Barcelona/dp/1568584504
I didn't struggle to find them online, they're right there on Amazon.
All gun owners in Germany were Nazis? What does that say about gun owners today? Gun owners are Nazis? Wow. Keep digging that hole.
>https://www.amazon.com/Gun-Control-Third-Reich-Disarming/dp/1598131621/ref=nodl_
Did you even read my link? It was a take down of the author and his "research" in this book.
Not only that, an Amazon store link isn't really a source of info.
As an aside, the Finnish biathlete shenanigans were relatively unimportant to the war as a whole. The real heavy lifting was done by Finnish soldiers who fought on the Karelian Isthmus, which was mostly just a conventional war. This isn't meant to diminish what they did*, just that they didn't go biathlon-ing around very much. The ski war stuff was up north, where the cold weather and thick forest were impeding Russian progress plenty without any Finnish intervention.
This book is a great book about the Winter War. If you want to learn more about it, without all the gung-ho Finnish nationalism that colors most sources, you should read it. It's also really entertaining.
*They did things like run up to Russian tanks and kill the crews inside by spraying Suomi submachine guns into the view ports. One officer stood in front of two advancing tanks and fired at them with a pistol. The tank crews, thinking that it had to be some kind of a trap, retreated.
That's just it. It's not a straw man.
/r/NOWTTY - "No One Wants To Take Your Guns"
That sub may be a bit wacky, but man, there's plenty of people, including politicians, who really do say shit like that. And they mean it. The Freudian slips are rapid fire.
If you would like a history lesson about why "gun registries" and other such "common sense" measures are feared, I suggest reading Gun Control in the Third Reich.
This is not some alternate history exercise, and one might argue the Holocaust would have happened no matter what. Very true, it might have. However, this book is very well researched, and it does show how and why the Nazi's used regulation that was already in place from prior administrations to further their agenda, by allowing only certain groups (namely, their own thugs) to be armed, using loopholes in those previous laws.
Remember, the powers you give the government might be inherited by a future administration ran by people you do not like, or maybe even fear, and thus you should be very careful just how much power you allow them to have.
Excerpts from A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 on foreign support:
> Finland's early victories fired the imagination of the outside world. The so-called "Phony War" on the western front was beginning to bore people. The first month of the Winter War, however, raised the spirits of all those who were opposed to tyranny, especially since so few shots had yet been fired in tyranny's general direction. As historian Max Jakobsen elloquently put it: "So many small nations had been bullied into humiliating surrender, the dictators had won so many cheap victories, that idealism had been left starving...The Maginot Line might have reflected a feeling of security for those living behind it, but it could not inspire them as did the image of a Finnish soldier hurling a bottle at a tank."
>
> Everybody wanted to get involved, now that it looked like Finland might have a fighting chance. Unfortunately there was a rather extensive global conflict going on, and that made it hard for well-intentioned volunteers to reach Finland. Nevertheless, spontaneous gestures of help were made from every direction. Eight thousand Swedes volunteered, and they at least were both close and acclimated. No other foreign volunteers saw as much action as the Swedes. Eight hundred Norwegians and Danes volunteered. A battalion embarked from Hungary. Italian pilots flew north at the controls of Fiat bombers. Three hundred and fifty Finnish-American volunteers sailed from New York on the Gripsholm. Among the stranger volunteers on record were a Jamaican Negro and a handful of Japanese.
>
> From London, the incurably romantic Kermit Roosevelt, son of the Rough Rider president, announced the formation of an "international brigade" optimistically entitled the "Finnish Legion." His recruiting bulletins were worded to imply that anyone who had ever donned a pair of skis was qualified to join, without further training or conditioning. Roosevelt rounded up a total of 230 men for his "Legion" and managed to get them to Finland by the end of March, too late to fight but not too late for them to become a major nuisance. The Finns who processed these warriors found them to be a motley crew indeed: 30 percent were declared unfit for active duty, due to age, outstanding criminal records, or gross physical infirmities. Several had only one eye, and one over-the-hill idealist showed up sporting a wooden leg, just the thing for ski combat.
>
> Their fates were as diverse as their personal stories: sixty of them tried tried to return to England via Norway but managed to land in Oslo, in April, at the same time the German Army did. Some were detained as prisoners, others managed tos curry back across the border to Sweden. About 100 of them just settled in Finland, doing whatever came to hand: farming, logging, teaching English. One man ended up as the resident pro at the Helsinki golf club. Another, a journalist named Evans, obtained a post at the British Embassy and eventually became Harold Macmillan's press secretary. The rest simply vanished from the historical record, blending in with their surroundings either in Finland or Sweden. It is even possible that a few of them eventually realized their desire to fight the Russians by serving in the Finnish Army during the Continuation War of 1941-44.
>
> The Finnish public was certainly flattered by all this attention, and the rumor mills worked overtime, cranking out increasingly fabulous yarns about imminent and massive foreign intervention. To the average Finnish civilian, it must have looked as though the entire Western world was flexing its muscles to help "brave little Finland."
>
> The muscle flexing, of course, was mostlly rhetorical. The sad truth was that few Western countries, no matter how sympathetic to Finland, were in any position to help out, due to overriding concerns of foreign policy. Nowhere was this more true than in neighboring Sweden, where the gulf between cold-blooded political reality and public emotion assumed the dimensions of national schizophrenia. Popular sentiment was accurately reflected in the recruiting posters of the Swedish volunteer movement:
>
> > WITH FINLAND FOR SWEDEN!
> >
> > NOW THE WORLD KNOWS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A FINN -- IT IS YOUR DUTY TO SHOW WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SWEDE!
> >
> > join the swedish volunteers!!
>
> Apart from the extreme step of actually volunteering, hundreds of "Help Finland" projects were underway by mid-December; everyone wanted to help. Everyone, that is, except the Swedish government, who found the Finnish situation acutely embarrassing. Sweden's ruling politicians did not dare offer enough help to make a real difference in the odds. To do so would have compromised Sweden's neutrality at a very precarious time. Direct intervention on behalf of Finland might have meant war with Russia, or it was feared, some sort of hostile move, eventually, from the Germans. Regarding the Germans, the Swedes were being overly sensitive. It was not, after all, in Hitler's best interests to allow a Soviet republic to be established only five minutes' flying time away from the strategically priceless ore fields in northern Sweden. At the very least, effective Swedish aid would have prolonged the conflict, and that, too, would have been in Hitler's interest, since the Finnish war kept Stalin tied down in the northland and turned away from the Balkans. Hitler would not have moved a finger to stop ten Swedish divisions from marching to the aid of Finland.
>
> Matters were not helped by the hypocritical vacillations of Sweden's leaders. The Swedish people were passionately proud of their volunteer effort, and if a plebiscite had been taken about the matter, they would probably have voted overwhelmingly to go to war for their neighbor and former province. Large segments of the Swedish population viewed their own leaders as spineless and craven. Some public officials resigned in protest and shame. When Foreign Minister Sandler spoke in the Riksdag and labeled his government's policy "neutrality carried to the point of pure idiocy," he was rewarded with a standing ovation.
>
> The Germans allowed some arms to pass through the Reich, until a Swedish newspaper broke the story and Hitler initiated a policy of stony silence toward Finland, in response to frantic diplomatic pressure from his new "ally", the USSR. Oddly enough, however, some of the strongest sympathy for Finland was manifested in Fascist Italy. Huge crowds, including hundreds of Black Shirts in uniform, demonstrated emotionally in front of the Finnish Embassy in Rome, then, carrying the Finnish ambassador on their shoulders, marched to the Russian compound and vigorously stoned it. Italy dispatched substantial shipments of military equipment, including seventeen Fiat bombers and 150 volunteers, one of whom was killed in combat. Väinö Tanner even made attempts to enlist Mussolini's diplomatic influence to bring about peace negotiations with Moscow. Il Duce, however, brushed aside those appeals. Like Hitler, he too was happy to have Stalin's attention turned from the Balkans, where he had dreams of aggrandizement equal to, if less reallistic than, those of the Führer.
>
> In America, popular sentiment was almost totally pro-Finland. To the American people, Finland was almost a "pet" nation: a tough, brave little country that always "paid its debts on time," spawned great late-romantic music, and enthralled sports fans with the exploits of its champion athletes. In New York, Mayor La Guardia sponsored a "Help Finland" rally in Madison Square Garden. The American Red Cross sent substantial humanitarian aid. Stokowski and Toscanini conducted benefit concerts --- all Sibelius, naturally.
>
> Franklin Roosevelt was caught in an awkward position by the conflict. He wanted to help Finland, but he was hemmed in by strong isolationist feelings in Congress and by the restrictive neutrality laws that were still on the books from the Spanish civil war. When the first reports of mass bombings of civilians blazed across the front pages of American newspapers, FDR actually contemplated severing relations with the Soviet Union. He was bombarded with so many political arguments against doing that, however, that he finally went too far in the other direction. The American ambassador in Moscow was instructed to deliver a gutless and generalized appeal for "both sides" to refrain from bombing civilian targets, stating that the U.S. government did not approve of bombing nonmilitary targets. The upshot of this policy statement, one historian acidly observed, was that "America was on record as being against evil." Nevertheless, Roosevelt permitted high-level American diplomats to confer with their Finnish coutnerparts for the purpose of finding ways to get around the letter of the law. The outcome of these discussions was a scheme by which, under certain conditions, certain types of arms could be purchased by nations friendly to the United States, provided that the deal was made on a cash only basis, and that any items thus contracted for were shipped from America only in vessels flying the flag of the purchaser.
Norman Davies is basically the better version of Jared Diamond. He's an actual historian, and does a good job of balancing depth with accessibility.
I really recommend both Europe: A History and The Isles: A History. They are both quite dense tomes, but Davies does a really great job of creating a narrative of the entirety of European/British history (from prehistory to modern times) while challenging our biases and subconscious notions. Instead of a tedious listing of events over 10000 years, he uses narratives and environmental/geographical analysis, interspersed with 'windows' where he goes into several key events in detail.
http://www.amazon.com/Europe-A-History-Norman-Davies/dp/0060974680
I've had Davies since high school and he's never failed me as a jumping off point into different periods and civilizations.
Also, Hansen is quite good at describing Hoplite warfare with an uncanny knack for the soldeir's perspective.
Everitt is great for looking at the fall of the Roman republic from Cicero's perspective. He also has a good book on Pompey but I have yet to read it.
These are the first 3 books I pulled off my shelf next to my desk, there are more but Ancient history is pretty broad (and two of my books arguably are classical rather than ancient), I'm not going to make an exhaustive list though, because well, that would be exhausting.
Some of my reccommendations
​
Anthony Beevor's books on Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin
​
Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place about the Siege of Dien Bien Phu
​
Osprey's book on Infantry Anti Tank Tactics. I thoroughly enjoyed this and gave me some insight into tactis that I can try out in the Combat Mission games.
​
[Hope you like it as much as I did.] (https://i.imgur.com/TFrI6xM.gif) If you do, you will not want to miss his follow-up book : [The Fall Of Berlin] (http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Berlin-1945-Antony-Beevor/dp/0142002801/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1418409049&sr=8-2&keywords=the+battle+of+berlin&pebp=1418409052291). Enjoy.
In The Fall of Berlin, Beevor talks some of the grumblings of Germans about the war, complaints about Hitler, the Nazi party, and general war fatigue.
It stands to reason that in the 42-43 period, Germans probably developed some souring on the Nazi's, Hitler, and the War. It's well known that Herman Goering, Luftwaffe Chief said that if the Allies managed to bomb Germany his name was Meir. Well, he was called Meir by many Germans (in Private), by then.
Do we have a definitive Rasmussen or Gallup poll of the German population? No. However other sources indicate that Hitler and the Nazi's were not as widely loved in '43 as they were in '40.
The Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clarke is a great book if you are interested in Brandenburg/Prussia/Germany and Berlin.
Postwar by Tony Judt is a good book for the later periods, however since both are thick I recommend to start with the first if you only got 4 weeks to read.
If you write a bit more about what specifics interest you I could motivate a friend of mine to join you.
Check out this book. It's quite long, but has pretty interesting stuff.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 - by Tony Judt
Correct, I don't have the numbers for you. However, I have given you a wonderful lead on finding something that you seem interested in. The book, Postwar, is a rich and in depth book about Europe prior to and post war. Reviewers noted the book's wonderful ability to dissect more modern history. If you're willing to write something like this:
>Yeah I'm sure a banking system lasting hundreds of years is nothing in the face of the holdings of 200 Jews in the 30s. The entire country is founded on that, definitely
Then, I'm certain you're willing to do some research beyond what you've already accomplished. You didn't seem to reference much in that quote, but I'm interested in where you've found your information.
Quite informed. I'm a Catalan :-)
Suggestions:
An interesting first person account of this would be George Orwell's (a Brit) Homage to Catalonia
I will answer part of your question.
The Spanish Civil War is a fascinating topic. If you want any reading on it, just check out some of the following books:
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. It is a first hand account of Orwell's experience in the war. It was quite fascinating to read about the different political views of people and the various issues which the Republican forces faced internally, as well as externally. It also gives you a first person perspective into the May Days in Barcelona.
The Battle for Spain is by Antony Beevors. I have picked it up and am currently about halfway through it. It is quite good, and it examines the various causes of the war, and the players associated with it.
This website lists other books although I have not read the others which are on that list, so I would not comment on their quality.
Also, don't be afraid to check out Picasso and Frederico Garcia Lorca. Popular artist and poet respectively, their works were heavily influence by the war.
Now, on to other wonderful things. If you still have an interest in the Spanish Civil War, after you read more on the subject, I would recommend the film Tierra y Libertad, or "Land and Freedom". It somewhat mirrors Orwells book, and it is actually a good look at the various people who took part in the war. One scene was particularly interesting, and that was the scene where a town was liberated, and the townspeople had to decide whether or not they would collectivize the farmland (basically a communist revolution, everyone works the land equally and gets the same amount) or to divide up the land and give everyone just a little bit more than what they had previously. This was a major issue during the war and actually caused a rift amongst the Republican forces, leading to (literal) internal fighting. The idea of revolution now vs. revolution later was a huge issue during the war, and this one scene (though fictional) was a good example of it. (I only recommend the film because it was a good cap to the subject. I wouldn't consider citing it as historical fact, as in I cannot say for certain these events happened, however, the scene mentioned was, in my opinion, a good example of the various sentiments which caused divides amongst the Republican Forces.)
As for the questions about WWII, please consult the Popular Questions Page.
I get the impression you aren't from the UK and your understanding of domestic politics here is very simplistic. Instead you seem to fall back on over-arching concepts (for example posting links to Vietnam era war crimes which have little relevance to a sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland) rather than the intricacies or specifics of the actual situation in Northern Ireland.
If you're actually interested in learning about the conflict I'd suggest this book as its relatively even-handed and focuses more on the personalities involved and the events that precipitated the conflict.
Part of the problem with the troubles is that the conflict is often misunderstood by people from outside the UK as being between two groups; The British state and Northern Irish separatists. However the reality was far more complex, The Troubles was fundamentally a sectarian conflict between Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. By August of 1969 the situation in NI was beginning to spiral out of control as violence between the Catholic and Protestant populations was reaching a tipping point and the British had little option but to get involved militarily. Whilst some parts of the British state did provide support to the Protestant community, other parts of the state tried to arbitrate a lasting peace. Likewise elements within the Irish Republic did provide support to the Catholic separatists whilst other elements within the Irish state also tried to broker a settlement. Both sides committed atrocities against the other and there was also involvement by third parties, particularly in the USA and Russia with their own agendas.
In the end while the British army couldn't defeat the IRA despite their efforts to draw them out into an open conflict, they did succeed in denying the IRA the ability to win the conflict through terrorism. That meant by the 1990s the IRA were forced to accept that any lasting solution would have to be a non-violent one. The Troubles is an excellent lesson in how a modern state can broker peace in a seemingly 'unwinnable' conflict. As the conflict wore on the British increasingly tried to clamp down on the loyalist paramilitaries to prevent further escalation.
The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World
I really enjoyed The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium
Another good one that comes to mind is London: The Biography
Also, if you're on FB, there are some pretty cool groups for UK history enthusiasts that you might want to join/check out. I bet if you asked this question in one of those groups (I used to be in a couple, but am not on FB anymore) you'd get a lot of feedback.
good recommendation. I've finished "The Year 1000" and found it interesting with respect to the daily life based on the work calendar. Nonfiction but interesting
It's a reddit version of pay it forward: a book recommended by Ron Howard on an AMA on here--A World Lit Only By Fire--is what inspired me to learn more about the Reformation.
When atrocities are committed on a wide scale by any government or organized religious group there is usually some group that benefits and apolgists to be found for them.
The Catholic Encyclopedia offers a version of events you doubtless prefer:
>At that time the purity of the Catholic Faith in Spain was in great danger from the numerous Marranos and Moriscos, who, for material considerations, became sham converts from Judaism and Mohammedanism to Christianity. The Marranos committed serious outrages against Christianity and endeavoured to judaize the whole of Spain. The Inquisition, which the Catholic sovereigns had been empowered to establish by Sixtus IV in 1478, had, despite unjustifiable cruelties, failed of its purpose, chiefly for want of centralisation. In 1483 the pope appointed Torquemada, who had been an assistant inquisitor since 11 February 1482, Grand Inquisitor of Castile, and on 17 October extended his jurisdiction over Aragon.
Source: Catholic Encyclopedia - Tomás de Torquemada
Tomas de Torquemada was quite brutal in his dealings with his victims, but perhaps you have no qualms about such methods when they are in service of the faith to stamp out dissenting viewpoints or to crush any rival religions.
>Torquemada's methods reveal much about one of the age's most unpleasant characteristics: man's inhumanity to man. Sharp iron frames prevented victims from sleeping, lying, or even sitting. Braziers scorched the soles of their feet, racks stretched their limbs, suspects were crushed to death beneath chests filled with stones
> ,. . .
>In 1492, the year of Columbus, Spain's Jews were given three months to accept Christian baptism or be banished from the country. Even those who had been baptized were distrusted; Isabella had fixed her dark eye on converted Jews suspected of recidivism -- Marranos, she called them; "pigs" -- and marked them for resettlement as early as 1478. Eventually between thrity thousand and sixty thousand were expelled. Meantime the king of Portugal, finding merit in the Spanish decree, ordered the explusion of all Portguese Jews. His soldiers were instructed to massacre those who were slow to leave. During a single night in 1506 nearly four thousand Lisbon Jews were put to the sword. Three years later the systematic presecution of the German Jews began.
>
> . . .
>
>At the turn of the sixteenth century, Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros -- who would become Spain's new inquisitor general -- provided Europe with an extraordinary example of medieval genocide. He ordered all Grenadine Moors to accpt baptism. Cisneros wasn't really seeking converts. He hoped to goad them to revolt. and when they did rise he annihilated them. Any nonconformity, any weakness, was despised; the handicapped were given not compassion, but terror and pain, as prescribed in Malleus maleficarum (The WItches Hammer), a handbook by the inquisitiors Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, which justified the shackling and burning of, among others, the mentally ill.
Source: A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age by William Manchester, Professor of History Emeritus at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, U.S. - First Paperback Edition pages 35-36
And, of course, one should not be gentle with heretics should one? Hence the heretics fork and the thumbscrew along with other such ingenious devices.
Just as there are those who justified and, in some cases still do justify, the anti-semitism of the Nazis, it doesn't surprise me that there are those who can defend the anti-semitism of those earlier times - The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition, was established in 1478 but wasn't definitively abolished until 1834. And just as there are those who will try to deny the atrocities of the Nazis there are those who seek to minimize or justify the atrocities committed during the Inquisition.
Of course the inquistion did not target only Jews and Jewish conversos (marranos) and Protestants, but also the Moriscos, converts to Catholicism from Islam.
>I would gladly justify the Institution to anyone who opposed it - as would all of the Spanish Catholics at the time.
Certainly there were many Spanish Catholics living at that time who approved of the Inquisition. According to The Inquisition, "During the 16th and 17th centuries, attendance at auto de fe reached as high as the attendance at bullfights." And certainly there were those who benefitted from the property siezed from the "heretics." There were many Germans who approved of the Nazis pogroms as well when their leaders whipped up hatred and fear among the populace.
Dreadnought. It's a history of the naval build-up prior to WWI. And it's sequel Castles of Steel about the naval history of WWI coincidentally.
> The idea—to create a make-believe battle squadron that could pass itself off at sea as real—was entirely Churchill’s. On October 21, [1914] he wrote to Prince Louis, then still First Sea Lord:
>>It is necessary to construct without delay a dummy fleet; ten merchant vessels . . . mocked up to represent battleships. . . . The actual size need not correspond exactly, as it is notoriously difficult to judge the size of vessels at sea, and frequently even destroyers are mistaken for cruisers. We are bearing in mind particularly aerial and periscope observations where deception is much more easy. It is not necessary that the structures be strong enough to stand rough weather. Very little metal would be required and practically the whole work should be executed in wood and canvas. . . . Even when the enemy knows we have such a fleet . . . he will always be in doubt as to which is the real and which is the dummy fleet. . .
> [...] before the end of the month, steamships were commandeered and brought to the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. [...] Within a week, wood and canvas structures were reproducing guns, turrets, boats, tripod masts, and bridges. Because a liner rises higher out of the water than a battleship, the merchantmen were filled with thousands of tons of ballast to push the hulls lower. The shapes of bows and sterns were altered. False funnels were added and were equipped with fireplaces to burn combustible materials that would emit thick clouds of smoke. Navy anchors were made of wood or were simply painted on the bows.
> [...]
> No one was fooled. Real battleship squadrons were usually made up of generally homogeneous ships. But when the dummies came together, some were twice the size of the others. Their speeds varied greatly. Some could make 15 knots, others 10, others only 7, and, as a squadron’s speed must be that of the slowest member, 7 knots became the speed at which the dummies could steam together. A 7-knot squadron could not operate with the 20-knot Grand Fleet. “The ships,” said Jellicoe, “could not accompany the fleet to sea and it was very difficult to find a use for them in home waters.” The suggestion that they be used as bait was rejected. An encounter with the enemy would have led to massacre.
> [...] At the end of April, the dummy Queen Mary was sent to patrol off New York City as a message to the German liners interned in the harbor that, if they violated their internment and tried to break out, a British battle cruiser was waiting to gobble them up. The assault on the Dardanelles suggested another use; the dummy battle cruisers Indomitable and Tiger departed Loch Ewe on February 19. To avoid being seen, they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar at midnight, and they were forbidden to enter the harbors of Gibraltar or Malta where they could be studied close up. The dummy Invincible followed six weeks later. Churchill hoped that by sending them to the Mediterranean, where they might be seen at a distance, they might “mislead the Germans as to the margin of British strength in home waters” and tempt the enemy to come out and do battle in the North Sea. The Turks did misidentify the dummy Tiger and reported her to a German submarine. On May 30, she was hit and sunk by torpedo and four British seamen drowned. A British midshipman with the Dardanelles fleet found grim humor in the event, imagining the U-boat captain “astonished to see the surviving crew clinging to the floating wooden turrets.”
> Thereafter, the curtain came down on the theatrical. Once Churchill left the Admiralty, the dummy fleet, which had cost Britain £1 million and four lives and Germany a single torpedo, quickly disappeared.
from Massie, Castles of Steel
https://www.amazon.com/Castles-Steel-Britain-Germany-Winning/dp/0345408780/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474414975&sr=8-1&keywords=castles+of+steel
This book was, in a word, riveting. I am not a naval history fan but I could not put it down. Covers this battle and the personalities involved in it and much more. Worth the time and money 100 times over to read it!
Rules of the Game is a must read for understanding Jutland.
The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591143365/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_W4MWCbDSQT8PP
Castles of Steel is a good book on the history of the war at sea.
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345408780/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_F5MWCb3C2YZC0
The hopelessness and the inevitability leading up to it fascinate me. I find WWI (more so than any other) to be a pointless, depressing affair; it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, with a 2 mile lead up. If you are interested in the causes, Robert Massie's book Dreadnought is a phenomenal read, and its followup Castles of Steel regarding the navel battle is equally interesting.
I am more of a book person.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Iron Kingdom. Even though it focuses more on economics, The Age of Revolution is also a good read. And the aforementioned article on Metternich which gives you a nice story-telling device to the later coalition wars until the liberal revolution 1848
Probably about as in-depth as you'd need for assassins creed. Also the further reading at the bottom.
But I'm going to go ahead and recommend Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama. His works are very accessible for people who want a good, non-fiction narrative history that also isn't incredibly academic.
Citizens is a really good account and a really good read. It's not a novel but I still highly recommend it
This one's really good, though not sure if there's an audiobook.
Christianity: I've heard that Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch is fantastic. I haven't read it. It's called "Christianity", not "Catholicism", but it might work for you given that Catholicism pretty much was Christianity until (relatively) recently.
French Revolution: Citizens by Simon Schama.
Can't help you with Zoroastrianism.
Schama's Citizens is a fascinating, readable book on the revolution.
Here's a review: >
>
> This well-written, thoroughly documented book should be on every high-school library shelf. It explains the self-destructive, bloody orgy that occurred in France but not in England or Prussia, countries in similar states of poverty and with similarly deprived, disenfranchised populaces. Schama theorizes that the cause of France's revolution lies in the self-deception of the ruling intelligentsia, who believed that they could make a Utopian France by allowing controlled violence, murder, and the destruction of property in the name of liberty, and all to exist simultaneously with good government. Schama presents Talleyrand, Lafayette, and others with more understanding than they are given in most histories, setting them amidst a web of violence of their own making. This book speaks to today's world, as nations strive to move from despotism to democracy. A more modern view of these same problems is found in Z. Brzezinski's The Grand Failure (Scribners , 1989) .
>-Barbara Batty, Port Arthur I.S.D., TX
It hits upon them here
But since this is a primary source book, the whole thing makes for a marvelous read. I re-read it about once/year.
>I didn't realize the ottomans were oppressive.
Not sure I say would oppressive as much as just not being ruled by your own peoples and the loss of the glory days of the arab states (though this had started long before this, I believe by the time of the crusades, the turks already controlled Baghdad and most of Syria). From what I read, the big problem with arab lands was that there was no clear system of succession, so everytime a king died, it was a free for all, making states fractured and weak (often local emirs would ally with the crusaders vs other emirs, failing to see the big picture).
If your interested, I highly recommened this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Through-Arab-Eyes/dp/0805208984
I read "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes" in College, that was a pretty good book. I can also recommend: "Muhammad, a prophet of our time" I read this also in college.
Obviously: http://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Through-Arab-Eyes-Essentials/dp/0805208984/
Actually, yes.
One of my favorite history-related books is The Cursades Through Arab Eyes which has had some rather anti-West summaries written about it in the past, but upon reading it, you find that those were most likely written by people trying to force their own biases onto it. So, while going by a summary might be good enough for deciding to read it or not for personal reasons, I really don't think it is good enough for judging, voting, or the like. (For the record, I'd really have no interest in reading it from the summary, and I'd write it off as drivel out of hand... but that's my reading choice.)
It's not necessarily from a shi'a perspective, but I highly recommend The Crusades through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf (author is a Christian Lebanese-French).
Russian atrocities to their own people were horrific, particularly throughout the war. They also exterminated Jews and blamed Germans (1). Allie bombing purposely targeted civilians (2), and after the war Allie behavior was ghastly, enslaved millions, and starved tens of millions (3). I don't think comparing atrocities is a good idea. I do think that the Germans and Japanese were far more horrific and purposeful in their carnage though. (Also I don't think we disagree here, really :)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
2: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/1413598/Germans-call-Churchill-a-war-criminal.html
3: http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-World/dp/125003356X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452280371&sr=8-1&keywords=savage+continent
I'm sure there was. I remember reading of an exchange between Churchill and one of his advisors after Yalta once it sank in that Stalin would control Eastern Europe after the war. Apparently Churchill simply asked his advisor "do you plan to live here after the war?" Answer: "No." Churchill: "Me neither..." Everyone was tired of war. The book Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II deals with the horrors of life in Europe in the decade following the end of the war. Too sad... No wonder so many desperately tried to go somewhere else like Canada or Australia. Nevil Shute's book The Far Country is about two of those.
I'd start with this: https://www.amazon.com/Europe-History-Norman-Davies/dp/0060974680
More History:
Europe: A History
Europe: European History
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
The Iran-Iraq War
Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide
Postmodernism and academic nonsense:
The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
More Politics:
A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
Human Nature/ Evolution:
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
On Human Nature
Clinical Psychology:
Introduction to Clinical Psychology (8th Edition) I'm not trained in psychology but I was told this one was quite good.
Ok, that's enough...
edit: double entry removed + sorting
	
	
	
> # Percentage of Europeans Who Are Willing To Fight A War For Their Country
>
>
>
> [Percentage of Europeans Who Are Willing To Fight A War For Their Country](http://brilliantmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/fight-for-Europe.png)
>
> _Map created by reddit user Spartharios_The map above shows the percentage of residents in various European countries who are willing to fight and go to war for their country.
>
> Full results below:
>
> From high to low, these are the percentages by country:
>
> - 74% – Finland
> - 73% – Turkey
> - 62% – Ukraine
> - 59% – Russia
> - 58% – Kosovo
> - 55% – Bosnia and Herzegovina
> - 55% – Sweden
> - 54% – Greece
> - 47% – Poland
> - 46% – Serbia
> - 41% – Latvia
> - 39% – Switzerland
> - 38% – Ireland
> - 38% – Macedonia
> - 38% – Romania
> - 37% – Denmark
> - 29% – France
> - 28% – Portugal
> - 27% – United Kingdom
> - 26% – Iceland
> - 25% – Bulgaria
> - 23% – Czech Republic
> - 21% – Austria
> - 21% – Spain
> - 20% – Italy
> - 19% – Belgium
> - 18% – Germany
> - 15% – The Netherlands
>
> The results are from a 2015 WIN/Gallup International global survey. The sample size and methodology was as follows:
>
> > A total of 62,398 persons were interviewed globally. In each country a representative sample of around 1000 men and women was interviewed either face to face (30 countries; n=32258), via telephone (12 countries; n=9784) or online (22 countries; n=20356). Details are attached. The field work was conducted during September 2014 – December 2014. The margin of error for the survey is between 2.14 and 4.45 +3-5% at 95% confidence level.
>
> Europe is the continent with the fewest people willing to fight a war for their country. Globally, an average of 61% of respondents in 64 countries said they would. Morocco (94%), Fiji (94%), Pakistan (89%), Vietnam (89%) and Bangladesh (86%) had the highest percentage willing to fight.
>
> The country with the fewest people willing to go to war was Japan, with just 11% of respondents saying they would fight.
>
> Since World War Two, Europe has been relatively peaceful with major exceptions of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s and various political suppressions during the Cold War. However, the 19th century was also a relatively peaceful time for Europe that ended with the start of World War I.
>
> For more on European wars and conflict have a look at the following books:
>
> - War in European History
> - The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
> - Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
> - Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
> - Europe: A History
>
> Find this map interesting? Please help by sharing it:
Owner | Source Code | Stats
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^/u/waterguy12
A couple that I've read from Antony Beevor:
Stalingrad, and its follow up book The Fall of Berlin 1945. Beevor has also written books on the Ardennes, D-Day, and an all encompassing book on WWII. I have yet to read those but can attest that his two Eastern Front focused books are fantastic
I would also highly recommend The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury. Absolutely haunting stuff.
Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939 - 1945 by Catherine Merridale
The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Anthony Beevor
The Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor is an amazing book.
Also Stalingrad The Fateful Seige by Beevor is great too.
> If you truly believe a victory of Wilders will lead to genocide, leave the country, because then we are already lost.
I don't "believe" anything, I merely note what he actually said. Which is the very opposite of "sensationalist nonsense". EDIT: I already left the country some time ago, not least because of the noxious political climate around Wilders. My win, your loss.
> you insist that Wilders is genocidal based on your own emotions about his speech
Again: I don't insist on anything. I can't see into Wilders' dark soul: for all I know he was just tickling the lizard brain of his audience. But I can read exactly what he said.
> Because otherwise Moroccans would mistake your for... a woman, and you would come into contact with their cultural view on women. Which isn't all too nice.
Oh, you know all Moroccans, so you feel qualified to assert that they are all sexist? I'm familiar enough with North African sexism, thank you very much, but I wouldn't generalise my experience with specific people to a whole country on that account, just as I wouldn't generalise my experience with individual racists in the Netherlands to all Dutch people.
You, on the other hand, seem comfortable with sweeping generalisations.
> And this is basically just one big insult, not an argument.
Believe me, if I insulted you, which I'm certainly feeling like doing, you'd know. You're just avoiding a reply.
> If you call people literally "evil" for voting a certain party, that's pretty much synonymous to calling them a "nazi", because no-one who actually uses the word means to invoke political ideology.
Quite frankly, you don't make any fucking sense. I believe that Maoism and Stalinism are evil: does that make them "synonymous" with Nazism?
I believe that PVVers are evil (but not Nazis, never mind "Nazi's"), because I've had a look at that party's platform and I find it is evil. If I'm not allowed to call a party program "evil" because that is "synonymous to calling it Nazi", then we are done discussing politics, thank you very much.
> No, the point is that you can't discuss someone's political views without, in effect, dehumanizing them
Evil, idiocy and misdirection are essentially human. I can hardly "dehumanise" anyone by pointing those out where they occur.
> if you're going to be a grammar Nazi
YOU CALLED ME A NAZI!!!!
> you should know that text between quotation marks is being quoted
Well, where did you quote "Nazi's" from, then?
> You have never heard of the Sack of Berlin?
I've even read Beevor's book, just as I read "The Fire. I even personally know several women who had to flee the advancing Red Army. Again, I don't see your fucking point.
Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945 were superb narrative histories of World War Two in the East. On the American end, the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy - An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle are great. I think somebody else mentioned The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. Just the first paragraph of that book is worth the price of the paperback.
If you're not into the whole military thing, The Worst Hard Time by Tim Egan covers the dustbowl era in the southern plains. Reads like an epic novel.
All of these suggestions prioritize craft of writing over intellectual rigor. I studied history, so I have a keen appreciation for the value (and the limits) of academic history. These books are not that sort of history, though I don't think any of them get any facts egregiously wrong. It's just that they're remarkable for being well-written - which should appeal to a fiction enthusiast - not for being pathbreaking academic treatments of their subject matter.
The best current writer on World War II is without doubt Anthony Beevor. A great historian and a riveting writer.
Anthony Beevor: Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943
Anthony Beevor: The Fall of Berlin 1945
Anthony Beevor: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
swummit replies:
> I'm currently reading Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt. The information I'm giving is me paraphrasing from...
Tony Judt's book: 'Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945' is worth reading. Although not specifically focused on Germany alone, it does provide the reader with a good general coverage of post 1945 events, and provides context for Germany's post war growth.
https://www.amazon.com/Postwar-History-Europe-Since-1945/dp/0143037757
Give "Postwar" by Tony Judt a read. It's incredibly detailed and goes over the history of Europe from 1945.
Fucking hell. Go read a book about this instead of just blabbing about.
Tony Judts Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is a fine starting point, though admittedly just gives an overview. It has a great bibliography though, so yea, good starting point.
Nobody said the EU was responsible for peace from before that particular union was created but it's a result of and a continuation of, thoughts and ideas from the immediate post war period and the treaties and communities founded at that time. Sheesh.
Hi, "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II" deals with this very subject and talks about the five years immediately following the surrender. It is a fascinating book and won the Pulitzer. I read it in conjunction with "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945" that deals a bit more expansively with the same subject in Europe and also won the Pulitzer. I cannot recommend either enough.
Hey, anarchy worked pretty well the last time
https://www.amazon.com/Homage-Catalonia-George-Orwell/dp/0156421178
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5470.1984
I'm surprised that in 5 years of study you never came across any of this stuff. Or maybe you weren't quite clever enough to understand it? Have you even read the Eco article I've already linked twice yet? Oh dear, I wasn't aware you had special needs; I'll give you a few months to catch up.
Анархо-синдикалізм ніколи не був метою непорушного союзу. Комунізм був, гегемонія пролетаріату була. Анархо-синдикалізм ні.
Більше того совєтські комуністи об'єднались з іспанськими монархістами в 1937 аби придушити суспільство анархо-синдикалістів в Каталонії. Орвел був свідком цих подій. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0156421178/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=34078847231&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=1652952024868718721&hvpone=3.65&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=t&ref=pd_sl_6hgkfj8ivl_b
You need to learn your history. The last time that was tried was in Spain after a fascist coup. The socialist and anarchist resistance was later sold out by Stalin.
I really recommend my favorite George Orwell book, Homage to Catalonia, about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.
I can link you some good books on the troubles and the period leading up to it.
The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal and the Search for Peace by Tim Pat Coogan (All of his works are about Irish history) https://www.amazon.com/Troubles-Irelands-Ordeal-Search-Peace/dp/0312294182/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525100677&sr=1-1&keywords=the+troubles+northern+ireland
Making Sense of the Troubles by David McKittrick https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Troubles-David-McKittrick/dp/024196265X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525100790&sr=1-3&keywords=the+troubles+northern+ireland
Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War: Britain's Counterinsurgency Failure by J.B.E Hittle https://www.amazon.com/dp/1597975354/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_9V04AbTGWG2H1
The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918-1923 by Charles Townshend https://www.amazon.com/dp/0141030046/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_WP04Ab3XZ0MQ4
The Easter Rising: Revolution and Irish Nationalism by Alan J. Ward https://www.amazon.com/dp/0882959743/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_NM04AbR6FCJMV
The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner 1969–2007 (Essential Histories) by Aaron Edwards https://www.amazon.com/Northern-Ireland-Troubles-Operation-1969-2007/dp/1849085250/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525100873&sr=1-2&keywords=the+troubles+northern+ireland
Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles, 1968 - 1999 by Lord Paul Anthony Elliot Bew and Gordon Gillespie https://www.amazon.com/Northern-Ireland-Chronology-Troubles-1968/dp/0717128288/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525101051&sr=1-6&keywords=the+troubles+northern+ireland
Northern Ireland: An Agony Continued: The British Army and the Troubles 1980–83 by Ken Wharton https://www.amazon.com/Northern-Ireland-Continued-British-Troubles/dp/191029439X/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525101212&sr=1-13&keywords=the+troubles+northern+ireland
The Irish Civil War 1922–23 (Essential Histories) by Peter Cottrell https://www.amazon.com/dp/1846032709/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_nR04AbTVG84BG
The Irish Civil War by Tim Pat Coogan https://www.amazon.com/dp/157098252X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_RQ04AbHSJ8QS7
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Troubles-Northern-Conflict/dp/024196265X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420798123&sr=1-1&keywords=the+troubles
Apparently Mark Carruthers' book is good for this, as is Making Sense of The Troubles. I hasten to add I am yet to get around to reading either of them, but have heard good things about both from academic types, contemporary journalists of the time, etc.
For a quick, interesting view of life in the medieval period, try the book "The Year 1000". It offers a day-to-day perspective on life in that year alone. Of course there were good and bad aspects of daily life, much like there are now. http://www.amazon.com/Year-1000-First-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579
The guys in the monasteries , but they would have been in Ireland, up near Scotland and on some of the islands.
You would pretty much be looking for the people producing the illuminated manuscripts. The years are off by a bit but take a look at the Iona Monastery and The Book of Kells as starting points
You might also take a look at the pop history book, The Year 1000, by Lacey and Danziger. It focuses on life in England at the turn of the first millennium.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-1000-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579
http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-1000-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579
Great book!
Since they're paraphrasing it anyways (AND WHY ARE THEY SAYING "FIRELIGHT"), here's a great source for running a Dark Ages game:
http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545562
It's not the best history, but it makes for FUN games.
Nonsense. This has always reeked of apocryphy to me. The VAST majority of men and women in, say, the Middle Ages had nothing near a sword or servants but were peasants lucky to have a sleeping pallet/house made of sticks. Read the book "A World Lit Only by Fire."
in this book http://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545562
I remember reading a long while back in a book that in the middle ages through the renaissance it was common for families to share one bed, no matter the circumstance. So the fact he was in bed with the mother with the daughter sharing may seem fucked up to us but it's not that strange in context.
There was a story of a pope who was banging a chick when her daughter who was sharing the bed began to imitate her mother's motions, the clergyman was to become to her he switched partners mid stroke.
I'll try and find which book it was and update this later.
edit: it was in "A World Lit Only by Fire" by William Manchester
Look into Wm Manchester's work, specifically A World Lit Only By Fire for a look at the Medieval period and the Renaissance. His other works are great, but less broad.
:-) Ah, another book for my wish list! [I'm for almost anything the Catholic church is against...!] Thank you!
If you don't already have it, another book to recommend: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age, by William Manchester.
https://www.amazon.com/World-Lit-Only-Fire-Renaissance/dp/0316545562/
It's been about fifteen years since I read it; it's worth a re-read by now. I remember appreciating it greatly because it was interesting enough to read almost all of it at one sitting.
There's a great write up on this in the book Castles of Steel
If you haven't read it already, you would probably enjoy this book.
The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History - Colin McEvedy 1961 for an overview.
2008, erudite conference output in Chapters 37 to 40
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Viking-World-Routledge-Worlds/dp/0415692628
The Viking World edited by Stefan Brink is a great source, filled with up-to-date papers written by some of the best scholars in Viking Age history and archaeology. It has chapters detailing everything from Norse-Sami relations, Scandinavian coinage to a few chapters regarding the impact by Scandinavians on the people they interacted with. I definitely recommend it.
The impact of the Scandinavian Invasions on Celtic Speaking Peoples is a bit dated, but is cool to have as a historiographical piece because so many of their interpretations have been proven wrong by new archaeological evidence and less narrow/literal readings of cherry picked primary sources (Binchy, for example, was a genius in the field of early Irish law tracts, however only reading law tracts will give you a very skewed view of how Irish society functioned). I only bought it because it's on sale and because it includes D A Binchy's classic "Changing of the old order" paper, even though new research has shown his theory of the vikings dragging the Irish out of an "old order" to be wrong.
With English history, I would start with the Romans. The "very short introduction" books have shown up in my old reading lists on multiple occasions at university.
I would then move on to the vikings. Again look at "a very short introduction". I would also look at "The Viking World". This is the textbook I used at Uni.
(Now we get to medieval England, my favourite) Look at the history of the medieval church christianity was central to medieval life. Look at the Black Death King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England, it is one of my favourite books of all time and an absolute pleasure to read. This book is a very good overview of medieval Europe This book is also a very good, but brief, introduction. I would read that one before the other one.
The Hundred Years war is an important part of English and French history. The Hundred Years War is a good brief book.
Now we get to the War of the Roses (if you like game of thrones, this is what it is based on). Hicks, M. A., The war of the Roses (2003). He wrote another longer book in 2010. Both are very good, but the 2003 book is much much smaller.
I never studied the Tudors or Stuarts at uni but I am sure someone else would be able to direct you to good books. When buying books look for "University Press" books. They are written buy lecturers and professors, world leaders in their field.
The Empire Project is a very good book, but not as small as the others I have suggested (well, except for the viking age one).
Don't be disheartened by the amount of books I have suggested, I promise the majority are tiny and pictures do take up a lot of room. If you were to combine them, they probably would be as many words as 2 big books. Wait for the books to become cheap or call up a university second hand book shop to see if they have them in stock. Again I highly recommend the "a very short introduction" books if you want to get to know an area of history without making the commitment of buying larger more expensive books. If you want my old reading lists I can send them too you if you PM me.
https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Kingdom-Downfall-Prussia-1600-1947/dp/0674031962/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1484263214&sr=8-4&keywords=german+empire
This one takes you through the 30 years war all the way to the downfall and dissolution of the Third Reich. Pretty Prussia-Centric, but still damn good.
Well it wasn't just Rome. Glubb looked at eleven empires over the course of history. I copied a relevant summary from the end. It isn't just the administrative state that leads to the collapse of an Empire, to be fair.
As numerous points of interest have arisen in the course of this essay, I close with a brief
summary, to refresh the reader’s mind.
> (a) We do not learn from history because our studies are brief and prejudiced.
> (b) In a surprising manner, 250 years emerges as the average length of national greatness.
> (c) This average has not varied for 3,000 years. Does it represent ten generations?
> (d) The stages of the rise and fall of great
nations seem to be:
> The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
> The Age of Conquests
> The Age of Commerce
> The Age of Affluence
> The Age of Intellect
> The Age of Decadence.
> (e) Decadence is marked by:
> Defensiveness
> Pessimism
> Materialism
> Frivolity
> An influx of foreigners
> The Welfare State
> A weakening of religion.
> (f) Decadence is due to:
> Too long a period of wealth and power
> Selfishness
> Love of money
> The loss of a sense of duty.
> (g) The life histories of great states are amazingly similar, and are due to internal factors.
> (h) Their falls are diverse, because they are largely the result of external causes.
> (i) History should be taught as the history of the human race, though of course with emphasis on the history of the student’s own country.
EDIT: Holy crap I suck at formatting. I rarely comment, which is probably why.
The real question is how technology will either speed up, slow down. or prevent the same thing from happening to America.
Will definitely check this out! Is this the book you are referring to?
https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Kingdom-Downfall-Prussia-1600-1947/dp/0674031962
I absolutely have to recommend The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans for anyone wanting to better understand the process of Hitler's rise. There are many other books I would suggest that deal with causes earlier and external, such as The Twenty Years' Crisis, but I am specifically responding to a comment about WWI.
There is much relevant information on the causes of WWI and it is safe to say that there were a multitude of factors at play. If you were to ask me, however, I'd say one of the primary causes was the weakening of two empires - that of the Ottoman Empire (the "sick man of Europe") and the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the latter thanks to Prussia.
Vienna was long the vanguard of Europe against the Ottomans and the Balkans were always a hotbed of controversy and revolt. The most direct causes of the pre-WWI situation are seen in the wars of the 19th century, which included things like Italian and German (Prussian) unification, the Franco-Prussian War, The Crimean War, etc.
Obviously WWI was the death-knell of monarchism and the coming of age for nationalism, but I digress. Definitely a complicated subject but certainly the after-effects of it led directly to WW2. Wars have long been generational. It's safe to say that it had deeper roots than the Treaty of Versailles; I'd argue the Treaty was merely a symptom of the European multi-polar way of thinking.
https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Kingdom-Downfall-Prussia-1600-1947/dp/0674031962
Here you go,
http://www.amazon.de/Iron-Kingdom-Downfall-Prussia-1600-1947/dp/0674031962
Earlier this week I just finished up Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution & McLynn's Napoleon: A Biography, both of which I highly recommend if you're at all interested in the French Revolution.
Citizens by Schama. http://www.amazon.com/Citizens-Chronicle-Revolution-Simon-Schama/dp/0679726101/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1408839675&sr=8-2&keywords=citizens
900 pages long.
Yeah, we'd all be so much better off with an angry mob "in charge." Read Citizens. Seriously, if you're going to run around advocating mob rule, at least first read a scholarly work that describes the results of such rule. I suspect you might change your mind.
https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Magic-Ancient-Egypt-Rosalie/dp/0140262520 This book i found to be very interesting when talking about old egyptian history. It gives a look into early society and how they went from scattered communities to a kingdom, but it focuses on the religious aspect.
I would think a book on Napolean would be a good start, and also a book on the French Revolution.
https://www.amazon.com/Napoleon-Life-Andrew-Roberts/dp/0143127853
https://www.amazon.com/Citizens-Chronicle-Revolution-Simon-Schama/dp/0679726101/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TS49J5H345TC8T3XXSS5
Citizens by Simon Schama well written and a compelling read, though with a somewhat anti-Jacobin slant
a good but less thorough book is Paris in the Terror by Stanley Loomis
Citizens by Simon Schama gives you an in depth view of the entire revolution. Best read after you've mastered the basics of chronology and character though, it's too detailed to be a good intro.
I have read his book and he pretty much admits that. It's not like he says, yes I knew it all, I've seen concentration camps and mass murder, but explains he was at first a nobody and connections with the top nazis gave him high life, importance and amazing friendships with all kinds of people inside and outside of Germany. Yeah, with those nazies in the package came a lot of bad stuff, but consciously he chose to ignore it and pretend none of it exists.
He's not proud of himself in the end, he understands how unprincipled it was to associate himself with those barbarians, but accepts his behavior as pragmatical. Shades of gray and stuff.
Alright, you're still taking the public word of history's most famous manipulative liar.
You're believing what he said in public speeches. Speeches he was giving for political reasons. Portraying himself as a Catholic to some audiences was politically expedient. The wikipedia article has dozens of sources, or you could go to library and check out transcriptions of Hitler's private conversations "Table Talk" , or Josef Goebbels' diary, or Albert Speer's memoir
There are literally no better and purer sources as to his private opinion on matters in existence.
You are still taking Hitler's public pronouncements at face value. Are you the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain? You probably don't believe that the Nazi's actually invaded Czechoslovakia because Hitler publicly promised he wouldn't at Munich...I got news for you, mate "Hitler promised not to invade Czechoslovakia, Jeremy...welcome to the real world."
You need to stop being so gullible.
That's just not true. Losers write a lot of history:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=node%3D9&field-keywords=Vietnam+War
...and:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Hawk-Down-Story-Modern/dp/080214473X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373240741&sr=1-1&keywords=Blackhawk+Down
...and:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Bay+of+Pigs
...and:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Little+Bighorn&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3ALittle+Bighorn
...and
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Third-Reich-Albert-Speer/dp/0684829495/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373240790&sr=1-3&keywords=Albert+Speer
This chap was on the losing side in two world wars:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_8?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=mein+kampf+by+adolf+hitler&sprefix=Mein+Kam%2Cstripbooks%2C142&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Amein+kampf+by+adolf+hitler
Then again, losers of battles and wars have good reason to think about what they did wrong and write about it.
Also you need to understand that victory and defeat are not always decisive and clear-cut. Victors like the Sioux, Vietnamese, and Somalis, were not in a position to dictate terms and do whatever they wanted with the vanquished.
I haven't read the book but if you are looking for other books about the Third Reich I would highly recommend this one. You can't "trust" it anymore than you can trust any other autobiography but it is fascinating nonetheless.
sigh.
Are we just going to spew sources to back up our opinions? Here's a few of mine.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Crusades-Authoritative-History-Holy/dp/0060787295
http://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Through-Arab-Eyes-Essentials/dp/0805208984/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=1HKV23ZQ71QA77PH9C9E
http://www.amazon.com/Pope-Urban-IIs-Council-Piacenza/dp/0199258597/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459174862&sr=1-1&keywords=pope+urban+ii
Sorry, I don't have any quick to digest youtube videos to show you.
I suggest The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf for a different perspective.
I was told by a historian that Jonathan Riley-Smith is one of the leading academics on the Crusades.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Crusades-History-Jonathan-Riley-Smith/dp/0300101287
Just as interesting and, from what I've been told, respected (to me, even more interesting, since the Arabs tend to be real drama-queens and the book seems to enforce that)
http://www.amazon.com/Crusades-Through-Arab-Eyes-Essentials/dp/0805208984
https://www.amazon.com/Concise-History-Crusades-Critical-International/dp/0742538230
Also a very good read
Many people here have suggested books on military tactics and warfare, and that's certainly a great place to start.
However, something that is oft-forgotten in fantasy warfare is the political elements of war. Because it's not enough that lands be conquered, they must also be kept.
A good place to start is Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince. It gives you a decent primer on the political landscape facing rulers, and the challenges faced in winning, losing, and keeping power.
However, from there you'll want to go for examples, and from there the best place is history. Most importantly, examples of history that tell the story of warfare, from beginning to end, so you can get a true sense of the purpose behind the conflicts. Here are a few examples that have been hugely influential in my own writings:
Highly educated opinions in that post. real edifying stuff.
Clearly the steady diet of racism and tabloid newspapers is rotting your "communist" brain. The post WW2 era refers to the first decade after the war. Take a step back from FOX news and look at one of these papery things commonly known as a book.
https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-World/dp/125003356X
https://www.amazon.com/After-Reich-Brutal-History-Occupation/dp/0465003389
There are many including Savage Continent Europe and After the Reich. There are many many books written on the subject. Google book post ww2.
I am not sure where you are getting this information from. The only book I have read on this specific subject is Savage Continent and any "atrocity" committed by the western allies obviously pales in comparison to what the nazis did.
"Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum is a fantastic and incredibly in-depth history of the prison camp system in the Soviet Union.
More sources for the gulag claim here: it appears historians are conflicted about the total number of people imprisoned by Stalinist Russia. Historian Anne Appelbaum, author of Gulag: A History puts the number at 1.2 to 1.5 million, a figure corroborated by historian Steven Rosefielde. Comparisons to history aside, America is currently has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the modern world today, including China and North Korea.
As far as internet freedom, please note I mentioned "western world," more specifically I will compare to OECD countries only. The US also imprisons people for internet speech. I will definitely stand by my claim that the USA is in, let's say the top 3, most surveilled state in the OECD nations. Moreover I will argue in other nations surveillance mostly comes through court orders in the judicial system, whereas in America mass surveillance via initiatives like PRISM is performed without case-by-case judicial oversight.
>firearms homicides trending down over time, while firearms ownership trends up.
Crime in general is decreasing as methods of detecting and punishing criminals advance, increasing the cost of committing a crime. Firearm ownership alone is not the full story as studies have shown increased firearm ownership is the result of gun owners buying multiple guns, not more people buying their first gun. This is evidenced by polling data that shows the number of people with a gun in their home trending downwards over time.
Meanwhile, evidence is quite clear than nations with nationwide gun bans experience a far lower homicide rate, and a drastically lower firearms homicide rate, than the USA.
>Your opinion about 2A causing tyrannical behaviour is simply that, your opinion. I would like to see you connect your opinion to actions that the government has taken.
Broad strokes - the more people use guns to commit crimes and violently fight back against law enforcement and the government, the more militarized and tyrannical the law enforcement and government becomes out of necessity for survival. There is the idea among the 2A community that civilian gun ownership makes the government "afraid" - this could not be further from the truth. In reality when police believe everyone they encounter could shoot them, it incentivizes the police to act quickly, brutally, and without mercy, because the paradigm shifts from "I'm peacefully helping my community and I have faith they will engage with me peacefully as well" to "I'm waging a war against criminals who are trying to wage war back, and the only way I can stay alive is to shoot first and ask questions later." The complete history of American police militarization follows this pattern - the police militarize in response to increased gun ownership among the public and the criminals they are meant to fight against, and now we end up with the highest levels of police killings, harassment, incarceration, and brutality in the developed world. Civilian gun ownership actively incentivizes tyranny - it does nothing to stop it.
If you want to learn more about this, I recommend this book:
A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the struggle that shaped the Middle East
http://www.amazon.ca/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400034094/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348616651&sr=8-1
Gulag by Anne Applebaum
This is how history textbooks should be written. Completely viseral and engaging.
Gulag
>Hitler, as well as many other predominant Nazis were actually two leprechauns. The initial plan was to round up the population and send nukes at them.
In "Hitler's Table Talks", Hitler stated that he was against nuclear weapons; calling atomic weapons "Jew Physics". He thought the the use of such weapons of mass destruction was barbaric and inhumane. (go figure!) But, I'm sure that he would have used any means possible to save his ass at the end of the war, and that includes nuclear bombs.
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-1941-1944-Conversations/dp/1929631057
> That's generally considered a good thing.
...You are now advocating violence based on ideological grounds when you say you do not know what those grounds are. If you do not understand how the Nazis think, you have no authority to speak on them. Read this. Or a free pdf. If you do not understand Nazis you have no base to speak on them.
>lol oh ok, i guess he wasn't that bad.
I never said that. Never would. He slaughtered the better part of my family.
>To Nazis, maybe.
To anyone who is not on board with the belief he is evil. He comes across as the peaceful easy going guy, while the people punching him come across as violent authoritarians. If you let him speak, he will look as bad as he is. If you attack him, it doesn't.
>To the rest of us it's still a fucking hilarious stroke of righteous karma.
No matter what you say violence is not a reasonable response. Period.
>https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-1941-1944-Conversations/dp/1929631057
Hitler's Table Talk. Specifically, p26.
>>"I shall no longer be there to see it, but I rejoice on behalf of the German people at the idea that one day we will see England and Germany marching together against America"
Of course I'll read some books. Perhaps you should do some reading as well. May I make a few suggestions?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226320618/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400034094/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/140009593X/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195051807/
how about this one
or this
or this that'll be fun for you to read..
Hitlers platform was a lie. It might surprise you that Hitler lied but it should be quite obvious that his claim of being a “Christian Party” is proven false based on his belief that Christianity is false and his hope that it will soon die. This proves completely that he was not a Christian, because you can’t be Christian if you don’t believe in the Christian Faith. It should come as no surprise then that he would lie in his 1920 platform.
The quote above was said by Hitler between 1941 and 1944, it is found in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .
Here is a link to the page I found the quote on:
https://enzaferreri.blogspot.com/2014/01/hitlers-neopaganism-anti-christianity.html?m=1
Here is a link to the book:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1929631057/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1929631057&linkCode=as2&tag=villagonlinema00
And lastly, you said that if two Christian Parties kill each other this does not prove they are not Christian. But these events usually take place on theological disagreements, especially during the medieval and Renaissance eras. Hitler killed the Confessing Church for purely Secular reasons. Thus the Nazi Party elevated Secular goals above Theological ones showing that as a Party it valued pragmatic Secular goals first. This by definition invalidates any claim of them being a Faith based party in Germany and lands them firmly in a Secular camp. The Nazi Party was not a Christian organization, and Hitler was not a Christian. I am still looking for his preferences for paganism in his table talks, I will post it here once I find it.
Cementiri de Les Corts:
https://foursquare.com/v/cementiri-de-les-corts/4e01eeb2d22db37fb0299a9c
He mentions it in the first chapter:
www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-La-Liga-Barcelona/dp/1568584504#reader_1568584504
It took me a while to compile my thoughts into this post, and to gather up links to online historical sources, so I know this is coming a bit late to the discussion, but I hope you'll get some value out of this:
>you having a semiautomatic rifle will not stop any government tyranny because nobody stops the United States military, and I understand that banning semiautos will not end all gun violence. I even understand that semiautos aren’t even responsible for a lot of homicides in the US outside of mass shootings.
So this is the bit that I want to focus on, because once upon a time, I posted to this subreddit about my views on guns and the 2nd amendment, and someone changed my view by making me confront the notion of a band of rebels defending against a drone strike. Then, I talked to a friend of mine about it (who happens to be a lawyer) and had my view changed back, lol. What he made me realize are 2 things, which I'll elaborate on in part:
Imagine a scenario with me where the President dissolves both houses of Congress, declares himself god-emperor, and actually starts a second civil war in which he sicks the military on the American populace. Could the military win such a conflict? Probably, but at what cost? It might not be as easy a victory as you would expect. There are more guns in this country than there are people. Granted, only an average of about a third of the households in the country own part of those guns, but the local percentage can vary widely from state to state. In the event of a civil war, who's to say that these gun owning citizens wouldn't get organized and disperse their weapons amongst their neighbors and fellow statesmen who don't have guns? In a state like Delaware, where only about 5% of the population owns a gun(s), the people might not offer much resistance, but in a state like Alaska, where two thirds of the people own a gun(s), or in Texas, where a third of the people own a gun(s) (in Texas a third of the population also amounts to about 10 million people), what exactly is the military supposed to do to crush the rebellion in states like that? They may have the advantage in technology, but they'll quickly find themselves being overwhelmed in numbers.
The misconception that I think most people have is that Americans will all unite and band together in a heroic attempt to dethrone the newly proclaimed god-emperor by marching on the capital and physically deposing him. At least, this is certainly the picture I had when I was a kid, but I think there are a lot of movies that reinforce that idea of a band of rebels struggling against tyranny. But the reality is that it would the U.S. military who would be forced to go on the offensive and find a way to quell the rebels, being easily over 100 million people in number, and being literally everywhere.
And that's to say nothing at all about the very likely scenario that half the military wouldn't even go along with their orders, and would return home to fight alongside their countrymen. Then the odds are in even greater favor of the rebels. The thing is, though, that the rebels don't even have to be able to actually win such a war. They just have to be able to be such a nuisance that any wannabe god-emperors would find it too costly to go to war, because it really would be an actual war - with its own people, on its own turf. Even if the government won, the detriment to the economy and our infrastructure and our population would be so taxing it would take decades, possibly even centuries to recover.
TL;DR - The hypothetical scenario of the President, or anyone in government becoming god-emperor, really boils down to a costs vs benefits problem, and the existence of the 2nd amendment makes the costs FAR outweigh the benefits.
Anyway, I mentioned that the second misconception I think people have is about what a tyrannical government looks like in practice, and I say tyrannical, but I should really use the word abusive. Obviously, an all-out civil war like in the scenario I laid out above doesn't just happen overnight. It happens slowly, over time, as government power becomes too centralized in the hands of one branch, or worse yet, one person. Imagine with me another scenario down the road a few years or so. Trump is still President, and through executive order, he makes it illegal to be a Muslim. He's able to work around the constitutional right that guarantees us freedom of religion, and when the law is enforced, it won't be the military enforcing it. Naturally, it will be the police, a different, oft overlooked arm of the government. Well, the police come to shut down their first mosque and arrest the Imam and probably others as well, but thanks to the second amendment, they're met with an angry mob of citizens bearing assault rifles. Not just members of the mosque, but members of other mosques, and even non-Muslims. Too many armed citizens for the police to subdue and carry off to prison. Now what is Trump to do? Does he call in the military? Does he drone strike the mosque? There's really nothing he can do here that won't result in the civil war scenario that I laid out previously.
This is the point of the 2nd amendment. It's not something that will likely ever have to be exercised so drastically as long as it remains a constitutional right. It's meant as a deterrent from the government ever trying to become too tyrannical.
But hey, maybe you're still not persuaded by my scenarios. Maybe you don't think they're plausible. Maybe you just don't think an armed populace is really enough to discourage Trump from stepping on Americans' freedom of religion. Well, apparently, an armed populace was enough to deter Hitler from rounding up the Jews and putting them into concentration camps. I just uncovered this little gem literally less than a week ago, so unfortunately I haven't read it myself. I've only heard what others I follow have to say about the book, so, small disclaimer there, but it details the gun control legislation in the Third Reich that Hitler used to disarm the Jews before rounding them up into concentration camps. I understand that the same happened in the Ottoman Empire before the Armenian Genocide, in Soviet Russia before the rise of Stalin, in China before the rise of Mao, and in Cambodia before Pol Pot (This is my source: https://www.naturalnews.com/039264_gun_control_timeline_true_history.html on the other governments. It mentions the years of the gun bans in each country, but I haven't yet found an independent fact checker that can verify these claims. I will edit this post when I find a more authoritative source, but I'm afraid if I wait much longer, you'll have lost interest in the thread and will have moved on, so take those last few historic claims with a grain of salt).
Not exactly. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers did nothing to stop the holocaust after anyone not a Nazi or that was Jewish or otherwise considered by the Nazis to be undesirable (gypsies, minorities, gays, etc.) was disarmed.
https://www.amazon.com/Gun-Control-Third-Reich-Disarming/dp/1598131621/ref=nodl_
> Our issues important, but please don't equalize yourself
http://www.amazon.com/Gun-Control-Third-Reich-Disarming/dp/1598131621
Would you call references to Nazi Germany "equalizing ourselves" with Holocaust victims? I feel even this most serious of injustices warrants comparison.
I'd go so far as to argue the exact opposite of your point. We should be comparing present-day America to all manner of past atrocities in order to learn from them and move towards a more just future. I'm not going to lock MLK into a little box in the history textbooks; there are relevant comparisons to be made between both of our causes. You're the only person bringing ego and pride into it.
They barely had any gun control. Unless you failed "The Test"
.....The real sticking point is that based on traits you were born with you could auto-fail 'that test' outright. But for everyone else it was about what you'd expect in a random Great Plains state.
-/u/OneBurnerToBurnemAll, parent
The book was published in 2012. You mean the agreement's text? Nah. Everyone knew where the Palestine region was but there was no definite border so they had to agree to one. Nothing about immigration so far.
The following comment by HPLoveshack was silently greylisted.
The original comment can be found(in censored form) at this link:
np.reddit.com/r/ Bitcoin/comments/89xoji/-/dwv73lj?context=4
The original comment's content was as follows:
---
> Don't worry, we'll just torture you until you produce a gun for us to confiscate.
>
> You should read Gun Control in the Third Reich.
Here's a book on the rivalry http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-La-Liga-Barcelona/dp/1568584504
The formation of the Israeli state and the reaction of the natives and the Arab states has to be seen within the context of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Essentially, after WW1, the British and the French divided up the Ottoman Empire according to which the French got everything to the north and the British everything to the south of a line in the shape of a tick/correction mark.
See here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/MPK1-426_Sykes_Picot_Agreement_Map_signed_8_May_1916.jpg
Part of that process was the Mandate system in which the two powers would oversee the transition into democratically governed states in the region who would eventually become self-governing. They encouraged Arab nationalism. The problem was that the British and French were both vying for power and resources in the region (oil was only beginning to become a major economic and strategic interest) and used their various Mandates against each other. The issue of Palestine was somewhat left off the table due to its religious importance and was eventually to be placed under international supervision, at least that was the plan. The British felt they had been forced into the agreement and in order to counter the French, they began to support the Zionists, some of whom were already in Palestine, and other Zionists in Europe. From that springs the Balfour Declaration. Their thinking was that if the Zionists were aligned with the British, then the British would have a more legitimate claim to Palestine than the French.
Of course, this went against the idea of Arab nationalism which had been promoted by the powers. So, there was a building tension as a result of this, and the result of increasing levels of Jewish immigration to the region. We must remember with regard to the latter that the Jewish/Zionist settlers were publicly backed by the British, and given the actions of the British in the region vis-a-vis blocking Arab nationalism, the natives were not happy. You also then had the rise of Revisionist Zionism, i.e., only a militarily superior Zionist enterprise would be able to take the land that they needed, the land being Palestine.
Here's a quote from a report by The Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab Congress that was sent to the British in 1924:
“The Palestine Administration, in pursuances of this rule, put into force (1921) a Turkish law that has never been enforced before, whereby a proprietor who fails to cultivate his land or a part thereof during three consecutive years will lose his title to it. The war-weakened farmer found it impossible for himself in the present crisis of financial stringency, costly labour and cheap product prices, to cultivate all his lands within three years. He, therefore, foresaw a part of his dear land cut off by virtue of that law, and thus frightened, he came down to the market to sell it to Jews at a low price....
The economic policy of the Palestine Administration pursues two lines of action, the one pertaining to Arabs and the other to Jews. The latter is progressive but the former is retrogressive. The overwhelming majority of the population in Palestine is composed of Arab farmers, of towns and villages, who are the sole producing element. Meanwhile, they are the poorest in the country. It is obviously essential that a good willing Government should, from the outset, give the first hand of assistance to them who give most and suffer most....
The Arab demand many be summed up in the following words: The establishment in Palestine of a National Constitutional Government in which the two Communities, Arab and Jewish, will be represented in proportion to their numbers as they existed before the application of the Zionist Policy” .
So you can see there was a lot of tension as a result of the British and their behaviour in the region. Later the Zionists got tired with the British due to the latter placing immigration restrictions on Palestine (see the two White Papers) so they turned to the French for support instead. During WW2 there was essentially a full scale rebellion in Palestine by the natives against the British but also against the Jewish paramilitary groups that had sprang up. The latter were funded and armed by the French government. It's an interesting irony of history that while the British were fighting to liberate France, the French government was arming and financing Jewish terrorists who were targeting British soldiers and civil servants in Palestine.
As for 1948, the Arab armies attacking was a result, in my view, of the broken promises by the British, Jewish terrorism that had been taking place for years, and of course the ethnic cleansing that began in late 1947.
This is just a general overview and not as detailed as I'd like. I could copy and past from my thesis but as it's a work in progress I'd rather not.
If you want more information on the background then I'd recommend James Barr's book, A Line in the Sand. It's fantastically written and there's a lot of information in it that's not widely known, such as the Stern Gang, a Jewish paramilitary group, offering assistance to the Nazi government in 1940 in return for the establishment of Jewish State in Palestine.
I recommend this book also if you're looking for some history.
http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-Liga-Barcelona-Greatest/dp/1568584504/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404755745&sr=1-1&keywords=fear+and+loathing+in+la+liga
>the Finns were fully committed to fighting.
I think one of the biggest misunderstandings of the Winter War was how brave and well organized the Finns were.
As far as why they lost - the Soviet regrouping you mentioned complemented the growing lack of equipment of all kinds that the Finnish were facing. Many began depending on looted ammunition and they became unable to launch any kind of meaningful counterattacks or the like.
Also, due to the Nordic countries not allowing (Franco-)British men/ammunition/etc to pass through their land, the Finnish quickly ran out of artillery and tanks as well.
For others reading this, this is a pretty good book about the war, in general. It goes into pretty good depth about the loss.
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-Adolf-Hitler/dp/1929631057
Hitler is a politician what he feeds to the public is just playing to the crowd and you fell for it and took his public statements literally word by word? I'm not saying you're wrong, Hitler is a Christian no doubt about it, but what he says and how he really felt are two different things.
> I think Hitler was not evil in the sense that he thought he did the right thing for humanity. And I think he was and idealist.
Umm, no that's not true. If you read this
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-Adolf-Hitler/dp/1929631057
he was anything but an idealist. And towards the end he said something along the lines of "if the Russians win the war it shows they are the superior race so why worry about the German people". I'd say he was a manipulative sociopath - I don't think he much cared for humanity. Of course he didn't say this in public because he'd never have got power. Once he was in power though and talking to his minions his misanthropy is very obvious.
I'm starting to get the sense that you didn't read my first comment. I literally said a very specific two year period before the end of stalingrad.
I then went on to talk about the people who joined the red army in the early war after the shock of operation barbarossa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa
Read the following Books for more information:
Ivan's war
Stalingrad
Leningrad
The Fall of Berlin
I don't know why you keep posting things from after the date range I specified. So many of the men who faugh in the early battles were dead by the time even operation Uranus took place, let alone during invasion of Germany.
Look I know about RKK certificates and the full scale looting of the European continent. I am not going to be bullshitted into believing that you got a fair deal.
https://www.amazon.com/Preponderance-Power-National-Security-Administration/dp/0804722188
https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Hitlers-Greece-Experience-Occupation/dp/0300089236/
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Beneficiaries-Plunder-Racial-Welfare/dp/0805087265
https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Spirit-Shield-Faith-Diplomacy/dp/1400043239/
And in case you think I haven't been exposed to the European contribution to recovery..
https://www.amazon.com/Postwar-History-Europe-Since-1945/dp/0143037757/
A World Lit Only by Fire wasn't too bad.
Edit: Some of the reviews on Amazon are pretty damning, to the point that they make me regret that I read the book. This book looks better based on the reviews.
Also stalin's White Sea Canal, during the first "five year plan" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sea%E2%80%93Baltic_Canal
which accounts for 250,000 deaths by 1933
Though one big reason they took a lot of the food away was for export. This correlated with the 5 year plan in terms of making the USSR more export oriented in order to gain capital. This would include the collectivization of Farms
For anyone interested in further detail on the Gulag system, I'd suggest Anne Applebaum's "gulag"
A must read for understanding the Horror and fear of the Soviet System of Repression.
This literally sounds like something Hitler would say about Jews. He thought they were vermin, a plague, a disease, or as you said, a mold. He didn't hate them, he was utterly repulsed by them. This book gives some really great lesser known insight into his kind of psychopathy.
Disgust is a much more powerful emotion than hate as it triggers our survival instinct. Be careful.
Also, read Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations