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 Cartoon History of the Universe is good for kids and grown-ups, although there might be some sections for which there has been much new research.
  
  
• You may also enjoy Guns, Germs, and Steel which gives an interesting theory of history up to about 1535. A book which tackles the same questions from a much more "cultural" (rather than geographical) angle is The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. They're a fun read together.
  
  
• I know the professional historians might disagree, but starting with the broad sweep of European history and working your way outward can be fun. I liked From Dawn to Decadence which is a bit of a luxuriating read and very detailed. Less detailed but also good popular introductions are Norman Davies' Antiquity and Europe books and Norman Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages.
  
  
• For a total timeline (big bang to now), Cosmos (the series or the book) is an awesome way to slot human history and science into the whole universe.
  
  
• Also, novels that cover crazy spans of time are great. One I liked was Bridge over the River Drina which helps you understand both Europe and the Ottoman Empire over the course of 400 years. Others can recommend novels in the super-epic (in terms of timespan) genre as well.

I think that's part of it, but Great Man theory isn't the only historical framework that puts an emphasis on characters, even singular important characters. One example that comes to mind is Shiela Fitzpatrick's Commissariat of Enlightenment (https://www.amazon.com/Commissariat-Enlightenment-Organization-Lunacharsky-Post-Soviet/dp/0521524385). It is very much based in social history, but also focuses on the importance of Anatole Lunacharsky throughout. It is not only his story, but it is a story to which he is central and someone who is interested in stories could certainly find an interest in that book.

Another example is microhistory - something that really hasn't proven to be very popular at all outside of academia. This is a kind of history that focuses intensely on something very small, sometimes a single person. Gizberg's The Cheese and the Worms is the prototypical example of the genre in this case (https://www.amazon.com/Cheese-Worms-Cosmos-Sixteenth-Century-Miller/dp/0801843871).

There is something kind of easy about it though. Our popular media is filled with stories of archetypal heroes and villains and the Great Man theory does, perhaps, lend itself to writing stories about characters that can slide into that particular kind of narrative.

That being said, Great Man history isn't the only thing that sells well. Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History has been very popular and is about as far from a narrative about a single person as you can get (especially if you don't count salt as a person!!)

So I'm going to plug for some books that I loved when I was a kid.

The Cartoon History of the Universe / Cartoon History of the Modern World, by Larry Gonick. I'd caution that it isn't for very young children, as they decidedly don't censor the sex and violence, but I probably started reading them around age ten, and the tattered copy of volume one I still have - and occasionally peruse - attests to just how much I read and reread them. The books are thoroughly enjoyable, and just the kind of thing to get a kid to really enjoy reading history. The only real word of caution Ii would offer is that yes, they are at the core pop history, and especially the earlier volumes - the first one was published in 1990 I believe - can reflect some outdated scholarship - but especially for young, budding historians, I don't feel this is all that much of a drawback. The goal at this point in time is to make history fun and exciting, and these books absolutely do that - and they prime the pump for enjoying dry academic tomes ten years later to get the necessary corrections!

On the topic of cartoons, I'll also plug Asterix and Obelix, which we'll be charitable and call 'historical fiction'. You shouldn't be taking anything from these to be accurate and teaching tools, but looking back, they are another set of works that I was reading as a kid that decidedly made me enjoy reading about the past.

For the Revolutionary War

• This Glorious Cause. One volume book, so it's not going to cover everything but for a general overview of the Revolutionary War it's great.
  
  
• Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy I'm partial to this one because of the focus on the Navy.
  
  
• Paul Revere's Ride Fischer does a great job in explaining the build up to the Revolution using Revere as a central figure.
  
  
• The First Salute. Barbara Truchman writes here about the vital role the Dutch played in keeping the Revolution alive via trade, and the consequences of that trade for the Dutch. It can sometime lose focus as Truchman goes into great detail about things that probably would be better left to footnotes, but it's still a great read. (Her Guns of August won a Pulitzer, and in my opinion it's a must-read for anyone at all interested in WWI.)
  
  For the Civil War
  
  
• The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote. I'm a big fan of this, but it is three volumes so that means it's rather long.
  
  
• Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson is also another classic in the field.
  
  
• Grant's Memoirs and Sherman's Memoirs are both must-reads.
  
  I have to recommend Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and Killer Angels by Michael Sharra, both fantastic military fiction.
  
  
  
  

For starters, there really isn't such a thing as a "middle-class citizen" in the Roman Empire. Roman social classes did not work that way, and wealth actually had less bearing on your existence than social status, inherited mainly from your ancestors.

The best resource for this sort of thing would be Jerome Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome. Carcopino was the premier classical social historian of his day, and most of what he says is still very much to date. To say more than that would honestly not get you anywhere. The lives of citizens varied pretty wildly depending on social status, wealth, and of course location (life within the city would be very different from life in certain provinces, which would differ even more from each other). A very few things can be said in general, however. The vast majority of the Roman Empire was enjoying the benefits of peace, a blessing that was not lost on them after nearly a hundred years of civil wars and nearly a hundred and fifty years of political strife within the noble orders. The reign of Augustus was also blessed with an extreme degree of wealth, which Rome and her empire had not seen the likes of before, and which was even more welcome considering the extreme deprivation that most people had suffered duing the destructive civil wars. Among the lower social orders the climate of Augustus' reign from the period after the War of Actium was incredibly welcome, providing great social freedom and opportunity, as well as unheard-of wealth. The upper social orders, mainly the survivors of the nobility, were a mixed bag. Most of the remaining prominent members of the senate and nobility had originally been lowlives under Caesar or Octavian, and had joined them because they had hoped that supporting them would help pay off their massive debts from extravagance. The rest were the few survivors of the old nobility that had been sure to kiss up to the dictators, as well as aspiring tyrants like Pompey and Crassus. Since the beginning of the 1st Century, B.C. the political climate at Rome had increasingly been one of power slipping more and more firmly into the hands of private individuals, and as a result there were throughout the century great purges, either through proscriptions or wars, of the members of the nobility. As a result, there was great dissatisfaction with Augustus' seizure of power among the nobles, but for them Rome was rather like a police state, since any disloyal actions would result in Praetorians knocking on their doors. These attitudes are echoed by Virgil and Livy, who had mixed feelings about Augustus, by Cicero (for example, in his Philippics--although all of this is technically before Augustus' reign, it still very much applies, as the loss of political freedom had already been cemented in place following Caesar's victory over the Pompeians), and even by Horace, who owed Augustus and Maecenas everything but who nevertheless could not quite bring himself to agree with the autocracy. For more on the destruction of the Roman political system, see Ronald Syme's groundbreaking work, The Roman Revolution, which was the first study (on the eve of Hitler's declaration of war, to whom Augustus is implicitly compared) to challenge the old Victorian view of Augustus as the "benign dictator."

The Constitutio Antoniniana which granted Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire was issued in 212 AD and there is quite a lot of Roman history after that. Soon follows the so called “crisis of the 3rd century” between 235 and 284 AD throughout which the empire was shaken by internal as well as external problems. Next comes Late Antiquity, a period which has attracted a lot of scholarly attention in recent decades. It saw some huge changes like Christianity’s rise to dominance or the final partition of the empire into a western and eastern half that you mentioned. And while the western part already disappeared throughout the 5th century the Eastern Roman Empire would survive for a long time further. The rise of the first Islamic caliphate in the 7th century AD cost it much of its territory and caused further transformations. This surviving remnant of the Roman Empire, now centred around Constantinople, is usually called the Byzantine Empire. Its eventful history would continue through the entire Middle Ages until 1453 AD when it was finally conquered by the Ottomans. So all in all there is more than a millennium of further Roman history to cover.

• Michael Kulikowski, The Triumph of Empire. The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (2016) might be a good point to start as it begins right in the period you’re already familiar with and leads you through the 3rd century crisis to the beginning of Late Antiquity.
  
  
• Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity. AD 150-750 (1989) is pretty much the foundational text for the modern scholarship on the named period. Its short, richly illustrated and just all around fantastic.
  
  
• Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire. A new history of Rome and the Barbarians (2007) covers the developments that would lead to the end of the Western Roman Empire.
  
  
• Peter Sarris, Empires of Faith. The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam. 500-700 (2011) has a larger focus than just Roman history and also concerns itself with the post Roman kingdoms in the west as well as (like the title says) the rise of Islam.
  
  
• Judith Herrin, Byzantium. The surprising life of a Medieval Empire (2009) is probably one of the best ways to first familiarise yourself with the huge timespan that is Byzantine history.
  
  
• Averil Cameron, The Byzantines (2006) is another excellent introduction to the entirety of Byzantine history.
  
  There are quite a lot of books that go into further detail about the different periods of Byzantine history but for the start those two general introductions should probably suffice. Of course you can always ask for more. I hope this helps!

I'm just a hobbyist passing through, but the go-to introductory books would be James Kugels' How to Read the Bible and Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible?.

An important concept that you'll hear a lot about, and may thus want to research independently, is the Documentary Hypothesis, which is the prevailing explanation of theTorah having been compiled from 4+ original sources. This suggestion is more of a reference book, but Oxford's The Pentateuch might also be a good resource.

If you are up for watching videos, this Yale Intro to the Hebrew Bible class is an excellent introduction.

If this isn't what you had in mind, I'm happy to brainstorm some other ideas.

I've only got a BA in Economics, but one of my favorite class is "Economic History of US" with A New Economic View of American History: From Colonial Times to 1940 as one of the required readings. It's an amazing book with plenty of graphs and statistics to support their conclusions. It explains the importance of the Erie Canal or "wealth" of a farmers in the 1800s or what does USD500 means to someone in 1800s.

edit: another interesting book called "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates" by Professor Peter T. Leeson, a Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. The book is about the economics of 18th century pirates/privateers/buccaneers, there's also a podcast episode of two Econ professor (writer & host) talking about this book.

An area that I am interested in (as a hobbyist) is the origin story of Yahweh and Yahweh worship that precedes, and leads to, the Torah. If you are interested some references on the growth of monotheistic Yahwehism from a historical polytheistic foundation of holy scripture to the development of the henotheism and then monotheism of early Biblical Israelites:

• [The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel](http://www.amazon.com/The-Early-History-God-Biblical/dp/080283972X) by Mark Smith<br />

• The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts by Mark S. Smith
  
• A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong
  
• The Religion of Ancient Israel (Library of Ancient Israel) by Patrick D. Miller
  
• Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches by Ziony Zevit
  
• Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Library Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies) by John Day
  
• God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World by Mark S. Smith
  
  While limited to starting with the Hebrew Bible as a basis, and not addressing much pre-Torah scripture related to Yahweh, the following takes a look at:
  
  
• Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible, by Michael S. Heiser, PhD
  
  While a College Senior Thesis (and the perception therefore of a less credible scholarly/appeal to authority level), the following is a good source of other reference material:
  
  
• The Ascension of Yahweh: The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism from the Afrasan to Josiah by Andrew Halladay
  
  Some of the on-line summaries/arguments which related to the above argument/position are:
  
  
• Are Yahweh and El the same god OR different gods?
  
• Ugarit and the Bible
  
• Israelite Religion to Judaism: the Evolution of the Religion of Israel By David Steinberg
  
• The evolution of God

It's time once again for the AskHistorians Book Giveaway! Our lucky winner this month is Vlad! The selection of books we have available this month are:

• Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, recommended by /u/freedmanspatrol.
  
  
• Hayden White's The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, recommended by /u/NMW.
  
  
• Jonathan Harris's The Lost World of Byzantium, recommended by /u/shlin28.
  
  
• Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, my recommendation
  
  Want a chance to get a free book? Help support the podcast via Patreon!

You seem to be interested in "microhistory". Believe it or not, since the 1970's, some academics have been asking big questions out of small places, and this has progressed into "New Historicism" and the history of ideologies.

For microhistory, see:

• Giovanni Levi: L’eredita immateriale. Carriere di un esorcista nel Piemonte del seicento.
  
  
• Carlo Ginzburg: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller
  
  For New Historicism:
  
  
• [Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare] (http://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Self-Fashioning-Shakespeare-Stephen-Greenblatt/dp/0226306593/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342813933&sr=1-6&keywords=stephen+greenblatt) I really love this one and have used it for graduate school papers in the past. The introduction is particularly enlightening.
  
  EDIT: hhawks12, great post! I like your thinking!

The Annenberg Foundation has an excellent online course in world history. It's challenging, but it'll give you a pretty thorough grounding in the major themes.

For American history, Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the more entertaining reads.

But for Quiz Bowl, you're probably better off playing the History Channel's Quiz game. There are a few thousand questions.

One of the best books I've read on the history of the late (Western) Roman Empire was Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. He provides a great deal of the latest research on the origins and movements of the different "barbarian" tribes and their relationships with the Roman Empire, including the Visigoths. The book is excellently written and accessible to someone (like myself when I first read it) who is new to the topic.

For more information on the Visigoths after the official end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 provides a very detailed chapter on the Iberian peninsula under the Visigothic kingdom.

If you do decide to check these books out, I'd recommend reading Heather first for both the obvious reason of chronology and because Wickham is a much more daunting read.

Thank you so much for writing this! I'll be coming back to this comment for a long time.

I'm specially grateful as many of the books you've listed have Kindle versions. I'm Ecuadorian and I've been very saddened by the fact that a lot of the books that I want to read are only available on paper... that's troublesome for me! I actually have to import them which is hard and expensive.

After a quick look I saw that your recommendation on the 4th crusade is actually listed as a penny book! That's just so nice as I'm actually on a tight budged and can't afford everything I want. It's actually an insane deal as somehow it's a 400 page book and yet it only weights 10 ounces! I'm limited to 4 Kg max per import so that's why I'm specially exited.

I actually have a few more questions right now. Sorry to pester you even more, but these are really the final ones.

Are you familiar with the northern crusades? One of the things that kick-started this whole thing was my interest in the Teutonic Order which led me to buy "Teutonic Knights" by William Urban (conveniently available on Kindle).

I've found the book to be good but I feel a bit lost as I'm missing the big scope of things: the author—focusing mostly on the POV of the order and its enemies—sometimes refers to events related to the area that I just don't understand (me being very unfamiliar with eastern Europe). For instance, he mentions the Wendish crusade and other conflicts several times but does not explain, which I imagine is because he assumes that reader is acquaintance with these events.

Anyhow I'm asking if you've heard good things about The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen. I was hoping it would help me better understand the big picture.

And lastly, there seem to be a lot of books from Osprey which cover an insane range of topic (a lot of which I'm interested). Would you recommend them?

I'm very cautious as it seems that most of the are exactly 64 pages long, which seems not that of a good deal are most of them are around $12, which to me is a lot as most of them are paperback only, which means I have to import them. Plus some like the one on mounted archers are very critiqued are the books were called "too superficial". Maybe the others that are not as broad won't have the problem but I'm still wary.

If you're looking for something that covers everything in a pretty entertaining format, I would suggest the Cartoon History of the Universe. It's a thoroughly cited series of comic books that inject a good deal of humor and narrative into history. The format leads it a little too heavily into great man history at times, but overall it's fantastic, and features a lot of Chinese and other Asian history that I don't see a lot of in Western books for a general audience.

Generally the "merchant" classes were found in what can be called "free cities" and there was quite a bit of red tape, mostly involving what would amount to grants of business rights from whoever the overlord was (in many cases the Churches, in others Nobles.) There were some pretty interesting showdowns as these urban areas developed between the Nobles that wanted to control them (and tax the wealth that was developing in them) and the residents, who were essentially fighting for freedom of trade. They were further regulated by what would have been the equivalent of guilds, etc.

Depending on the relations between these free(er) cities and surrounding areas, trade was either good, or could be terrible.

The beginning chapters of The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy, by Peter H. Wilson does a really good job of going through the various social constructs for the geographic regions involved in the war. I found fascinating the legal constructs of the HRE.

I'm still trying to map out exactly what was going on in the HRE, though. I got busy with work and haven't been able to put the time in on reading this in about 6 months.

Link for the book, well worth buying, since you will likely read it about 10 thousand times trying to figure out what exactly was going on.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Thirty-Years-War-Europes/dp/0674062310

TL:DR: Hannibal was too far from support to effectively besiege Rome and a siege did not fit into his grand strategy.

About your question: Hannibal was far from support in the Italian peninsula. The one serious attempt to reinforce him was stopped by the Romans at the Battle of Metaurus. Rome by this time ruled the seas and Carthage could mount no serious challenge to Roman naval power. Thus a relief effort by sea was dangerous at best. So Hannibal did not have the wherewithal to besiege Rome without putting himself in extreme danger. The one time he could have gotten away with it was in the aftermath of the Battle of Cannae. However, Hannibal's grand strategy was NOT to take Rome, but instead to dismantle Rome's network of alliances by taking the allied city-states one by one. Hannibal thought that eventually Rome would be drawn to negotiate a peace after its allies had been conquered or switched to Hannibal's side. Thus Hannibal expected that Rome would surrender after Cannae. The fact that Rome continued to fight after it had suffered three resounding defeats is not something reasonable people would expect.

The Fall of Carthage is the best, most comprehensive book I could recommend. It covers all three Punic Wars. It is impossible to truly understand Hannibal without a full view of the entire conflict between Rome and Carthage so this book is a great way to understand everything you can about him.

The Lithuanians didn't convert, their leader did. Paganism was still everywhere in the Lithuanian holdings and the leaders also joined in on pagan rituals. This was part of the reason why the Order kept fighting the Lithuanians. The biggest reason they fought them was that the Lithuanians kept fighting them as well. There are a few easy to read books on the subject, but The Northern Crusade by E. Christiansen should give you a good overview of the Baltic situation.


Feel free to ask if you got more questions. I don't know everything, but know a fair bit about the TO in the Baltic.

A History of God by Karen Armstrong is a pretty good and accessible text about how the God concept changed over time

Hey, I'm glad to be of service! :D And again, if you need any more, please don't hesitate to ask. On to the points!

• Carthaginian history is awesome - and I'm counting down those days to Rome II, myself! My preferred go-to when it comes to Carthaginian history (and the Punic Wars, for that matter!) is Richard Miles' Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. However! I pride myself on being open-minded, and a user I really admire (/u/ScipioAsina) has suggested Dexter Hoyos' The Carthaginians. I personally (unfortunately!) haven't had a chance to read it quite yet, but I'll put it out there! :D Next, as I said before, I'm a big fan of Adrian Goldsworthy, so I'll go ahead and recommend a couple of his books - The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146 BC and, more simply titled, The Punic Wars. Finally, it's not a book specifically about the Punic Wars, per se...but Barry Strauss' Masters of Command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and the Genius of Leadership is EXTREMELY good.
  
  
• First off, remember that the civil wars in Rome had started a long time before Caesar's Civil War ;) But yep, you're correct! Probably the best book on the time period is Tom Holland's Rubicon. For a second suggestion, I'll add in Goldsworthy's (SHUSH) Caesar: Life of a Colossus. I'm drawing blanks on more books, but the books that are just as important as Rubicon, in my opinion, are Caius (Gaius) Julius Caesar's own works.
  
  
• Teutoburg, I'm hesitent to advise too much on - I haven't done extensive research into it, myself. Sorry!

Have you read Fall of Roman Empire by Peter Heather (not to be confused with more famous book by Gibbon)? If so, what's your opinion on it?

From that book, I got an impression that in principle Rome could have held it together if it had clear succession of strong rulers. Every once in a while a strong general like Stilicho or Aëtius would emerge, consolidate power, drive back the barbarians, and start reconquering land. Then they'd face a setback, be deposed, and a period of chaos would follow when Visigoths, or other Germans, or whoever else, would reclaim the territory and then some.

I think "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong is a pretty good start; it covers Judaism, Christianity and Islam. About the ancient christian movements before Roman Catholicism, I'd suggest you "Lost Christianities" by Bart D. Ehrman. (In fact, I'd suggest to read all his books, they're awesome)

About the different branches of christianity, I'd suggest you to study the history of the Protestant Reformation. I'm not sure about the history of Christianity in the U.S... here's a wild guess based only on the reviews: A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada by Mark A. Noll.

Jonathan Shay has written two really excellent books on the topic, focusing specifically on how the depictions of the characters of the Iliad and Odyssey portray a then-unrealised form of PTSD: Achilles and Vietnam, and particularly Odysseus in America. I'd recommend them highly - both are very well written, and accessible even if you aren't a student of psychology/Classics.

The Cheese and the Worms is awesome. Glad you mentioned it, it's an even-better example of what I was trying to explain.

Not sure if it counts as a "firsthand account," but the inquisition records of Domenico Scandella (AKA Menocchio), a heresiarch in 16th C northern Italy, are fascinating.

The guy was fearless in articulating his heretical interpretations of Christian theology to the inquisitors who were interrogating him. You can read about this in The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg.

The Mongols are incorrectly lumped in with the regular form of barbarian as you might expect of a Gaul, or Viking.

Weatherford discusses in his book on Genghis Khan that any group which was willing to surrender would be treated kindly and added to the Mongolian Empire without bloodshed. As a token of his appreciation Genghis would take a wife from that group literally making them apart of his tribe.

http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/0609610627

I have nothing to contribute to this excellent comment other than to recommend that the OP read The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, which is an excellent book that answers this very question.

Also very relevant is this book comparing the experiences of Vietnam vets with the character and behavior of Achilles in the Illiad, and to other attestations of the "berserk state" throughout history. I recommend it enthusiastically.

>This one wasn't specifically answered except in that the Captain was generally elected. Were the other positions on a pirate ship analogous to other sailing ships?

Essentially, yes.

>So a quartermaster was picked because of his reputation and honesty. Were they deposed like pirate captains if they abused that power?

All positions were elected.

>Any specific resources for me to go to?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Invisible-Hook-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346266258&sr=8-1&keywords=the+invisible+hook

http://www.amazon.com/Under-Black-Flag-Romance-Reality/dp/081297722X/ref=pd_sim_b_15

http://www.amazon.com/Villains-All-Nations-Atlantic-Pirates/dp/0807050253/ref=pd_sim_b_10

>So abducted crew that were pressed due to their skills weren't required to fight.

Not necessarily. Every pirate crew was different.

>What about crew that signed up voluntarily but still had the same skills?

Everyone fought. No fight, no money.

>Do we actually know of any examples where someone like a surgeon willingly joined a pirate crew before being abducted?

Yep

>I saw that pirate captains got 1.5 shares of any prizes. How was the rest divvied up?

Each was different. google pirate code to see examples of various codes.

>also you mentioned the "workman's comp" plan for pirates--did this come out of a general fund

it came out before the shares were divided.

>How were repairs and supplies paid for on a voyage?

Lol, paid? almost everything was stolen.

>Would they follow the practice of their issuing country or something similar?

They followed the signed articles. The sponsoring nation would also get a substantial cut, and it was common to hide spoils from them.

>Was ransom a common thing or were pirate crews generally more interested in getting to the goods?

Only wealthy people and government officials were ransomed really, it probably paid into the general fund.

>Presumably there was a whole secondary market set up with merchants being willing to buy from pirates and then resell later on.

Lol, oh yeah. Read the invisible hook and this one. also read up on Port Royal, Jamaica, the "wickedest city on earth."

>What kind of literature do we have on these secondary markets?

Lots. Read through the books I recommended and it will explain a ton of it.

Thank you very much. I think my professor's source was Ansary's Destiny Disrupted, which we've been reading as a sort of overview of Islamic history. I'm enjoying it, although it doesn't profess to be a history book exactly.

Can't be of much help when it comes to Eastern/ Central Europe. This book is quite good though, so perhaps start there. Sorry!

It's a good read for historiographies, but I'm sure ancient historians have gone past some of his theories. Nevertheless, it's still regarded as a classic.

If you want more modern books, check out: Peter Brown's World of Late Antiquity and Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire

There are different theories on the fall, you could probably go through an entire library of them. I just picked selections I had from class, as I think these were more readable.

My religion class used Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Friedman. This is not an annotated text like some of the other suggestions (i.e.- it won't go line by line and give you notes on what the context of the verse is) but rather, it's a look at the question of authorship and the context of authorship. It might be a good entry point into a study of an annotated bible.

To recommend a good secondary source on the subject, you should take a look at Supplying War by Martin van Creveld.

This is a different issue. You are referring to the documentary hypothesis. The Torha seems to come from several different sources with different religious ideas. So there are different names for God depending on the source material. In addition early Judaism seems to have been polytheist and later transforms to monotheism. So there is acceptance of other gods at times.

The Cartoon History of the Universe is surprisingly good in this regard.

http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-History-Universe-Vol-Pt-1/dp/0385265204

Most of the goods were shipped in to France. By 1944 German Naval power was not what it used to be and while there were still attacks on supply convoys the Allies did a decent job of establishing Naval dominance. As they moved forward they also established supply bases on the mainland so as not to stretch supply lines as well as massive logistic backing behind each unit. Especially interesting is their concept of airborne units where the entire unit staff is dropped with supplies.

There's a very good book about the history of military logistics by Martin van Creveld called Supplying War if your interested in that (https://www.amazon.com/Supplying-War-Logistics-Wallenstein-Patton/dp/0521546575).

Maybe Richard Shannon's two-volume biography?

Gladstone: Peel's Inheritor, 1809-1865 (1982)

Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865-1898 (1999)

See also David Cannadine's Victorious Century (2017) and his book The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990), part of the AskHistorians booklist. There are countless threads in this subreddit about the Victorian Era.

Not exactly trucks, but is this the book your looking for?

https://www.amazon.com/Supplying-War-Logistics-Wallenstein-Patton/dp/0521546575

I remember seeing it sighted as a good source for logistics but not sure where I saw it.

It's not explicitly about the conflict in the Middle East, but Destiny Disrupted provides a ton of good context for the Islamic perspective.

From Daily Life in Ancient Rome, by Jerome Carcopino:

pp. 152-153:

>"On a base of interwoven strips of webbing were placed a mattress (torus) and a bolster (culcita, cervical) whose stuffing (tomentum) was made of straw or reeds among the poor and among the rich of wool shorn from the Leuconion flocks in the valley of the Meuse, or even of swan's down. But there was neither a proper mattress nor sheets above. The torus was spread with two coverings (tapetia): on one (stragulum) the sleeper lay, the other he pulled over him (operimentum). The bed was then spread with a counterpane (lodix) or a multicoloured damask quilt (polymitum). Finally, at the foot of the bed, ante torum as the Romans put it, there lay a bedside mat (toral) which often rivalled the lodices in luxury.
>A toral on the pavement of the bedroom was almost obligatory. For the Roman, though he sometimes protected his legs by a sort of puttees (fasciae), wore nothing corresponding to our socks or stockings and went barefoot when he had taken off his sandals to go to bed. His normal footwear consisted either of soleae, a kind of sandal such as Capuchins wear, with the sole held by a strap passing through their eyelets, of calcei, leather slippers with crossed leather laces, or of caligae, a type of military boot. On the other hand he was no more accustomed to undress completely before going to bed than the oriental of today. He merely laid aside his cloak, which he either threw on the bed as an extra covering or flung on the neighboring chair.

>The ancients in fact distinguished two types of clothing: that which they put on first and wore intimately, and that which they flung around them afterwards. This is the difference between the Greek endumata and epiblemata; and similarly between the Latin indumenta, which were worn day and night, and the amictus which were assumed for part of the day only.

>First among the indumenta came the subligaculum or licium, not as is sometimes supposed, a pair of drawers, but a simple loin cloth, usually made of linen and always knotted round the waist. In early days it was perhaps the only undergarment worn either by nobles or by labourers. Manual workers had no other."

p. 166:

>"Whether she slept in a room of her own or shared a room with him, the Roman woman's morning toilet closely resembled her husband's. Like him, she kept on her undergarments in bed at night: her loin cloth, her brassiere (strophium, mamillare) or corset (capitium), her tunic or tunics, and sometimes, to the despair of her husband, a mantle over all. Consequently she, like him, had nothing to do when she got up, but to draw on her slippers on the toral and then drape herself in the amictus of her choice; and her preliminary ablutions were as sketchy as his. Pending the hour of the bath, the essential cura corporis for her as for him consisted of attentions which we should consider accessory."

if you want to learn more about genghis khan I would highly recommend this book http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/0609610627

I do believe this is the book you're looking for. There is most definitely a correlation between the two.

A History of God is a good source to explore the polytheistic roots of Judaism. It uses writing style correlation to map "authors" and revisions in the Old Testament and follows the eventual emergence of YAWH as the sole deity of the Jewish people.

If you want to more information on the founding of the US Navy I would suggest reading http://www.amazon.com/Six-Frigates-Epic-History-Founding/dp/039333032X. It goes in depth into the reasoning and building behind ships like the constitution and the rest of the small US navy at the time.

THIS. fucken great book. came here to mention it.

link for the lazy to some excerpts
http://www.amazon.com/The-Invisible-Hook-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095

I'm not sure if these necessarily meet the standard for this sub, but two layman-friendly and highly interesting books you might like are Lies My Teacher Told Me and Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches.

You'll want to read Ivan's War, by Catherine Merridale. It's the best English-language treatment of the average soldier's experience.

It would not be fair for me to speak on behalf of the French/West Francian experience, but as far as Germany goes, the answer is no.

For starters, there were four major kingdoms definitively established in western and central Europe from the Treaty of Verdun:
West Francia, encompassing much of modern France,
East Francia, encompassing most of modern Germany,
Italy, which took up the majority of the Italian peninsula and shared borders very close to the modern borders of Italy,
and Lotharingia, a state caught up between West Francia and East Francia, including the Lowlands, modern Switzerland, and a relatively thin strip of territory between them.

Lotharingian land became a source of much contention between several European powers from the Treaty of Verdun onwards. The Burgundian Succession, for instance, was one such example. Another example was the Treaty of Ribemont, where Lotharingia itself was divided up by the other Carolingian kingdoms. This land never gained a national identity, instead fracturing between German and French cultures over the millennia of violence fought over it.

East Francia DID NOT become Germany. When the Holy Roman Empire was recreated by Otto I, he was considered the king of Germany. However, this kingdom was heavily decentralized, and people identified themselves with their feudal overlord than their king, or their Emperor, when the HRE was formed again. When the kingdom title became elective in 911, division into separate “states” inside the Empire was guaranteed. There were intense divisions between Holy Romans in Austria and Holy Romans on the border with Denmark. Holy Romans in Bohemia, between both of these geographic groups, spoke Czech, not German. Economic bases were completely separate in these varying parts of the Empire, and where Austrians had gold, Pomeranians had Baltic fish. Simply put, the only people who ever wanted to make the HRE a proper, centralized, unicultural state in the modern sense were Emperors themselves, and even then, emperors who would have wanted that were few and far between. Asking why the HRE never became Germany is asking why Italy never became German: It was never intended on centralizing.

The Protestant Reformation threw a much stronger wrench into any idea of German unification, with religious division becoming not just more intense, but much, much bloodier. The southerners, like Bavarians and Austrians, held to their Catholic belief, sharing their closeness with the Papacy and their even more Catholic Italian neighbors in the Empire. Northern Holy Romans did not share this warmness and closeness, and did not hold the same trust in the Pope’s word that their siblings of the south did. The printing of the Bible for all to read was something the northern Germans began to cling to very strongly.

So, what changed? As with many questions of Europe between early modernity and today, the answer is Napoleon, or, more accurately, the French Revolution.

The French Revolution was truly terrifying to the European kingdoms and the Emperor of the HRE. With the defeats from the first of the coalitions, the Emperor encouraged minor states to merge with their larger neighbors. In many ways, this was an Austrian power play to consolidate power on all of their lands, allowing for them to unify all their South German land cleanly into a “full” Austria. However, this had the same effect in North Germany. North Germany had many more minor states and city-states, and they, instead, merged into Prussia. The 1806 destruction of the Holy Roman Empire was attributed to Austrian weakness, causing even further resentment in northern and western Germany. The German Confederation formed to protect the minor states that remained, with Austria conveniently being in a weaker state than when they were Emperor. Prussia could easily consolidate power, and, with the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, German nationalism, not Prussian nationalism, was finally born.

Sources:
Peter Wilson’s Heart of Europe and The Thirty Years’ War

According to psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, very much so. He is noted for the following books comparing Homeric myths with PTSD:

Achilles in Vietnam

Odysseus in America

I'm not a historian but afaik the historical records of Jesus are slim to none.

Edit: as for your main question this is a bit of a side to your question but does deal with some of the issues
http://www.amazon.com/Wrote-Bible-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/0060630353

Was gonna answer but then I noticed someone already did, so same thing but different source

I read it in this.

Ivans War is a solid start from there I've read a number of books about individual battles some of which include personal anecdotes from soldiers but I've yet to come across a book, in English, written from a Russian soldiers perspective.

This book could be a very interesting read for you: http://www.amazon.com/Death-Traps-Survival-American-Division/dp/0891418148/

The reason of high crew turnovers was not because the old crews got new vehicles, it was because the old crew was dead. As tanks were valuable, knocked out tanks were often patched up. If the hull was a loss, they would re-use the turret and vice versa.
Cooper describes that if they were 'lucky' the would find the projectile that knocked out the tank inside the tank so they could use it to patch the hole (as the projectile and the hole often had the same diameter.

If you really want to gather as much info as you can, you should check out some of the dozens of excellent books on this subject, including Mary Beard's Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (link), Aldrete's Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii, and Ostia (link), or Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire (link). As you can see, there is a lot of material on many aspects of life in Pompeii in the first century--way too much to cover here. I can provide some outlining to get your started on your questions, however.

 

Pompeii was a typical town of its type (veteran colony), and had all the amenities we expect from such a place. It was neither large nor small for a veteran colony, but about in the middle, having about 12,000 inhabitants (a third of them slaves) and about twice that many in the immediate surrounds (villas, farms, etc). Most of the "big" buildings were constructed or embellished in the decades after the town became a colony after the Social War, or during the early Empire under Augustus and Tiberius: an aqueduct, a theater, an amphitheater, a recital hall, public baths, temples, markets, etc. There was a large forum, of typical Roman design, with a capitolium temple at its head, a temple of Apollo, a public meeting hall, flanked with colonnaded wings connecting basilica and markets for meat and vegetables, and adjoining a modest bath complex. The streets were roughly orthogonal, with a few kinks and sharp turns belying very ancient foundations, nicely paved but grimy enough to warrant the famous stepping stones.

As far as its importance to the Empire: not very, unfortunately. It was a hub of local commerce in Campania, but one of several, and obviously not indispensable. The city had sided against the Romans in the Social War, and even at the end still wore vestiges of its non-Roman past. Pompeii shared the arena with a neighboring town, Noceria, and had in recent times engaged in a full on riot against the Nocerians over, apparently, a sports disagreement, to the general annoyance of the Emperor back in Rome. In other words: yes, the city was "on the map" at Rome, and big enough to deserve consideration, but not big or important enough to warrant resurrection after the event. In a few decades, the town was apparently almost completely forgotten. Pompeii had been the crossroads of a few important Roman roads, particularly the route moving north and south along the coast between Capua/Neapolis/Stabiae, but this road was completely obliterated in the eruption anyway and when it was rebuilt, it simply traveled over the moonscape terrain which had once been Pompeii. A road leading east to Noceria might have continued to function and might have linked up with the region again after the dust settled, but I can't find any good information on that.

I really encourage you to take a look at one or all of the books I linked above. They are very accessible and stuffed full of good information on the daily goings-ons of the Roman world in the first century.

Don't know about Shakespeare, but other premodern storytellers appear to have dwelled on the subject of combat trauma's effects.

I am reminded particularly of The Wanderer and The Iliad.

I really enjoyed this one here - though it's more about the Punic wars and mostly from Rome's perspective. It has some background on Carthage. My understanding is that there isn't a whole lot of information about Carthage outside of the Punic wars, though.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Carthage-265-146BC-Paperbacks/dp/0304366420

Hey I am back, and here are the sources you asked for. First one is from wikipedia though I would point out that apparently citations are needed for the section in question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_losses_in_World_War_II#Land

The wiki gives about 42,000 losses of T-34s

Here is another from a blog that uses this book as a source.

http://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.com/2012/07/wwii-myths-t-34-best-tank-of-war.html

They give 44,900 losses

And another which also gives 44,900 as the total losses:

http://www.operationbarbarossa.net/the-t-34-in-wwii-the-legend-vs-the-performance/#Conclusions%20Regarding the T-34’s Overall Performance as a ‘War Winner’

Here is a discussion of casualty figures from Zaloga, and from the author of the book I linked:

http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000024.html

I admit I rounded up to 45,000 when I made the album.

Hope that was helpful!

Hello! I've recently finished The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson. I was curious if anyone knew any books of similar depth on the Italian Wars of the late 15th and early 16th century?

There were also multiple incidents of poison gas canisters leaking and triggering local detection gear. These canisters were close enough to the front that the chemical teams often thought they were under German attack, until they found the leak.

I believe that one such incident is detailed in the book Death Traps

>The reason I think the Sherman gets a bad wrap is a combination of propaganda, people looking at casualty figures outside of their context, and people fixating on flashy stats like thickness of the frontal armor and size of the gun.

Propaganda from whom??

Didn't testimonies from Sherman crew members also contribute to this "bad rep". In Particular, Death Traps (http://www.amazon.com/Death-Traps-Survival-American-Division/dp/0891418148) , written by Armored Veteran, who was in charge of maintenance and salvaging the tanks. I mean , he explicitly doesn't say the Sherman was a bad tank but he sort of reinforces this notion of Sherman being a sub par tank.

I'm not a historian, but a passionate student of history. I decided to pursue it as an academic discipline (and possibly as a career) when I read Lies My Teacher Told Me when I was 16. It's a fantastic introduction into the way history is taught in the US (so it might not be that relevant if you didn't grow up in America), and probes into the politics of the textbook system. And you get to find out that most of our nation's presidents were horrible racists, that we fought secret wars in Finland/Russia, and that J. Edgar Hoover tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. The essential story is that, as agentdcf so eloquently put it, history is by no means one-sided, and it's pivotal that we consider historical figures as people you could know in everyday life. No one's perfectly good or perfectly evil, but a lot of standard history curricula tend to present it otherwise.

Per Krivosheev, out of 1 836 562 of POWs who got back into USSR (and about the same number emigrated), 233 400 were sentenced to various terms in GULAG. That's ~12%.

You need to distinguish several major POW categories:

1. POWs, freed from extermination camps. Almost never got harsh sentences.
   
   
2. POWs who fled from camps and broke thru (or so they claimed) enemy lines or joined guerilla bands ('Partisans'). Were they turncoats, trained for spying and terrorists attacks? Or were they honest soldiers? That was the question for SMERSH ("СМЕРть Шпионам" - "Death to Spies") operatives. Some of Brandenburgers were indeed placed into camps, then staged breakthrough with 'real POWs' to gain credence - see Shellenberg memoirs:
   
   ---
   Thousands of russians were picked in POW camps, who were infiltrated by paradrops into russian territory. Their primary goal was political propaganda and diversions. Other groups were targeting Partisans (e.g. pro-Soviet guerilla)
   ---
   
   (I have access to russian-translated Shellenberg book, that's quick translation into English)
   
   
3. POWs who changed sides and were captured while fighting along with germans - Hiwi. Kinda self-indicted and well, real traitors - but not all of them were shot on spot by troops. Many were, yes - and they weren't counted.
   
   
4. (Not strictly POWs) soldiers, who were left behind enemy lines and who either broke thru enemy lines or were living on occupied territory which were freed and then all populace filtered. This is by far the largest category - and some of them served as Hiwi or took part in nationalistic guerilla bands (Ukranians, Chechen and Crimean tatars mostly), which were conducting acts of terrorisms. Brandenburgers were also mixing up with (окруженцы - encirclee)
   
   Toughness of interrogation and chance of being acquitted depended a lot on personality of an interrogator.
   
   >how accurate Soviet methods for assessing treason were?
   ---
   
   I am not aware of any 'accurate' methods for assessing treason...
   
   So it was inaccurate, of course - if interrogator was able to get in touch with your unit and it could provide a glowing recommendation - you're free. If your CO was alive and asshole or great, but KIA - you might get a long sentence - depending how well you were holding up on interrogations. Mostly circumstantial evidence was used in convictions - like lack of serious wounds, general attitude to USSR, any inaccuracies in accounts how you've been captured, whether personal papers were saved or lost etc.
   
   Sources:
   
   
5. Schellenberg, Walter (2000) [1956]. The Labyrinth: Memoirs Of Walter Schellenberg, Hitler's Chief Of Counterintelligence, translated by Louis Hagen. Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0306809279
   
   
6. Russian Wiki - Soviet POWs in Great Patriotic War
   
   
7. G.F. Krivosheev - Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century Hardcover
   

I'm not an expert but I can give you the layman's version from Six Frigates. (This is more concerned with the Naval history and events that lead to the conflict.)

The budding US military needed competent sailors because of continued conflict with the Barbary Coast states. As a result some of the sailors were from other countries (which was common in all navies at the time) and many of them were either current or former citizens of the British Empire.

At the same time the English were in a conflict with France and desperately needed more men for the Royal Navy. As a result they began impressing former British sailors from ships that didn't belong to them and specifically that were sailing under the colors of the United States. As you can imagine, with the Revolutionary War still very much in the common mind, this didn't sit well with the fledgling nation.

In 1807 there was the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair, an international incident involving the desertion and recovery of sailors from British ships. The commander of the Leopard (Captain Salusbury Pryce Humphreys) unexpectedly opened fire on the Chesapeake after the Chesapeake refused to heave to to allow a search for deserters.

This nearly started a war by itself but lead to growing dissatisfaction in the United States with the way that the British (and the Royal Navy in particular) disregarded the sovereignty of the US.

Six Frigates also maintains that the British ambassador to the United States and the American president (James Madison) took an immediate disliking to each other which further disrupted diplomatic relations.

This breakdown of communications and the refusal of the American Congress and British Parliament to back down eventually led to the war.

At the time, too, the United States had the eponymous six frigates (Constitution, Chesapeake, Constellation, United States, Congress, and President) which gave them a fair amount of strength in the north Atlantic and they held a strategic advantage over the Royal Naval forces who were engaged with the French Navy. This strength contributed to the idea that the Americans should not back down. (The six frigates were also of a newer heavier variety which led to early victories in the war that deeply disturbed and embarrassed the Admiralty.)

The English (according to Six Frigates) wouldn't back down because they win at everything naval and all foreigners are inferior.

It looks, to me, like a slow-motion train wreck.

You are very welcome. Not sure if you have read it but an absolute must for understanding the first 40 years of the USN is Ian W. Toll's 6 Frigates. http://www.amazon.com/Six-Frigates-Epic-History-Founding/dp/039333032X

And int he end by 1815 the USN just didnt have very many officers it could turn to for senior command.

Truxton and Dale had left prior to the war and were persona non grata. Prebble was dead along with Lawrence.

That essentially left Perry, Bainbridge, Decatur, Hull, Chauncey, Stewart, Rodgers, and Macdonough as the cadre of experienced captains to virtually run the navy. Which explains how to even just fill out the ranks men like Barron and Porter were brought back into the fold. And how men like Elliott attained rank. For better or worse there were about 2 dozen men of any rank in the USN who had commanded a vessel in battle and they couldnt afford to let too many go for reasons of personality conflicts.

Though when they started killing each other that was a different matter.

>Thanks! Just ordered Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. on the bay ($3.86freeshipping)
>
>Personal accounts are of interest. Have you read Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations ...?
>
>Only just started but of interest especially the dissidents (?)
>
>for example pg 79 THOMA: I foresaw the whole thing....I regret every bomb, every scrap of material and every human life that is still being wasted in this senseless war. The only gain that the war will bring us is the end of the ten years of gangster rule...
>
>Every day the war continues constitute a crime. They must put Adolf Hitler in a padded cell. A gang of rogues can't rule forever. It would be a pity if any one of them was shot. They ought to be made to do heavy work until they drop down dead."

​

​

​

​

​

​

One wonders if he suspected he was being recorded;playing for the audience. Of course, it's easier to be judicious when one is safe, and, also, correct in hindsight

​

Thanks again!

There's a couple:

In elementary school, I Love Paul Revere Whether He Rode or Not was my first introduction to the idea of history with an agenda. It's mostly a collection of interesting facts, but it does spend some time talking about why people (Americans specifically in this case) mythologize our history.

In Middle School I went totally crazy over the US Civil War, largely because of Gettysburg.

In high school came Marx & the concepts of class and progressive history. I'm not a Marxist politically (not anymore at least, but how else does a history nerd rebel in high school?), but I do think these ideas inform my personal historical narrative.

Then came the reason I finally returned to school for history: Lies My Teacher Told Me. I'd already been bothered by American politicians and citizens presentizing the opinions and actions of our founding fathers, as well as the myth of our unified national ideology, but this book illustrated how we pass that flawed narrative along, dooming people to make the same mistakes.

The most comprehensive source on this is Krivosheev's Grif sekretnosti snyat, which has figures for all Russia's/USSR's 20th century conflicts with WW2 of course being most prominent among them. Here is the text in Russian, the WW2 chapter is the fifth one; the wealth of information is summarized in the tables, and I think you'd be able to get at most of it via Google Translate. (The book has an English translation, but appears to be both abridged and highly expensive to boot).

As for your specific question, the answer is - not long. As was pointed out, 1941 was an extremely deadly year, accounting for slightly more than 25% of total irrecoverable despite being only half a year. 1942 - another 25%. So, ~55% in 1941-42. The statistically most likely fate for a soldier called up in 1941 was to be captured in one of the great encirclement battles, and die in a Nazi PoW camp. If he survived through to 1943, his risk profile would slowly converge and, from 1944, begin to look better than his equivalent in the Wehrmacht. In particular, his risk of capture would drop dramatically henceforth; the risk of being killed would substantially fall, though it would still remain extremely high relative to most armed conflicts; and his risk of getting wounded would start exceeding the risk of getting killed by several factors (a high WIA-to-KIA ratio is a sign of a well organized military).

Also worth pointing out that risk profiles differed quite radically for different branches of the armed forces. I don't recall the source, but I remember reading an estimate of "life expectancy" (that is, from induction until KIA/MIA/WIA/POW) in 1941 for them: It was around 3 months for infantry vs. 3 years for artillerymen, with intermediate numbers for tank men, airmen, etc.

This is the book I would recommend as a starting point to the subject. It is The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Cannadine.

The premise is that it was a combination of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of popular democracy, and the effects of two world wars that led to the British nobility losing so much of their hold over the country in less than a century.

I would add that you really can't underestimate the effect of the First World War on that transformation. First, it was an opportunity for the lower classes to see how completely inept many of their supposed social superiors were, in ineptly leading them into a seemingly pointless and incredibly bloody war. Secondly, the crippling debt incurred by Britain during the war and the ensuing economic crisis. And thirdly, many of the young officers in the British Army during the First World War were scions of the nobility, and the casualty rate among those officers was severe. While the phrase "Lost Generation" might be a bit much, it is not going too far to say that the loss of so many future Dukes, Earls, Viscounts, and Peers did have an effect on the break up of the British Aristocracy.

I have to disagree. We have lots of reports of cities willingly opening their doors to Genghis rather than fight him because of how horribly he would treat civilian populations who resisted, not because he was nice. You are right that war atrocities were much more common back then and the standard for cruelty was much higher- but that is all the more reason to think he was especially horrible. If he was considered shocking and horrible by people back then who were more used to that kind of stuff, then we should consider him more horrible, not less. I mean, it takes a special kind of cruel to get Crusaders to freak out.

The reason he didn't have to lay siege all the time and put down rebellions is because of how cruel his conquests were, not because he was nicer than we think. You mentioned that the Mongols created their reputation but they did so by actually doing horrible things and then letting some survivors go to warn others. I recommend Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World or Dan Carlin's recent Hardcore History podcasts on the subject if you're interested.

I have not read all of his work, but a skim reading of Stalingrad to Berlin confirms what I'd guessed based on the time period Ziemke was writing. All but one of Ziemke's Red Army works were written before the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the works written before 1991 rely heavily on German sources, as access to Soviet archives was virtually nonexistent. Some authors did get around this - John Erickson's Road to Stalingrad and Road to Berlin come to mind - but by and large the Amercan writings on the Eastern Front were written through a very German lens. Stalingrad to Berlin is no exception. The footnotes are, predominantly, references to German documents and memoirs. For instance, Erich von Manstein's self-congratulatory Verloren Siege (Lost Victories) is cited dozens of times. Several official Soviet histories of the war are heavily cited as well - the 1960 Istoriya Velikoy Otchestvennoy Voyny Sovetskogo Soyuze for instance. However, the official histories are the product of careful censorship, and as such were generally looked at very skeptically by Western historians. The "Notes On Sources" section in Ziemke's Stalingrad to Berlin is quite candid about this. This would not be a problem, were it not for the failure to apply the same skepticism to sources like Manstein. This, as you might expect, leads to a skewed interpretation of the war, in which the Germans were hobbled by the constraints of Nazi fanaticism and worn down by Russian manpower & resilience despite their superior mastery of the art of war.

Ziemke's writing reflects this perspective in a number of ways, such as in his assessment of the Soviet command's professional acumen. He portrays their increased proficiency at war from 1943 onward as the Soviets learning lessons from the Germans and adapting them to their own needs:

>One consideration which must have weighed heavily in the Stavka's decision to undertake a summer offensive was the knowledge that the Soviet Army had passed beyond its apprenticeship. In two years Stalin's generals had learned much and, not content to be blind imitators, had adapted the German methods to suit their own capabilities and limitations. While they had not attained the facility of the Germans, they had, at least at the upper command levels, acquired the flexibility so conspicuously lacking earlier and had improved their large-scale offensive tactics...The Russians, for their part, cared less for speed or the fatal stroke; they were content to wear the enemy down blow by blow. Their ultimate objective was to annihilate the enemy, but by the cumulative effect of repeated offensives, not by the single battle--by weight rather than by the skillful blow. (144-145)

This is simply not correct. The Soviet way of war did call for repeated, synchronized offensives, but these were not intended as an attritional cudgel. Rather, the aim was to penetrate into the enemy's depth and, through speed and shock, separate the components of the enemy's forces so they could no longer fight as a cohesive unit. This lesson was not learned at the hands of the Germans, either, but through the Russian Civil War and then years of peacetime theorizing. They did adapt during the war, of course, as combat experience sharpened them, but it is not accurate for Ziemke to describe the Soviet way of war as derivative of the Blitzkrieg. Unfortunately, Ziemke was writing while the Western military-academic establishment was in the throes of the 'Wehrmacht mythos' and so it's not surprising that he depicts the Eastern Front in this light.

This is really terribly long-winded, I'm sorry. I recently wrote a very long reading list for another poster here, which you might find helpful. There's also a lot more discussion there of the 'Wehrmacht mythos' and other issues in English-language writing on the Nazi-Soviet War. Some of the books in there are probably longer and more niche than you're looking for, so here's my short list:

1. Glantz, David M and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 384 pages, available as paperback, hardback, and ebook.
   This is one of the best single-volume operational histories of the Nazi-Soviet War. It's fairly deep but also relatively quick and easy to read. Unlike Ziemke and many of the other pre-1991 authors, Glantz and House used Russian archives extensively. David Glantz is still the one of the best English-language historians of the Nazi-Soviet War and of Soviet doctrine and theory, though he is unfortunately semi-retired now. Jonathan House's coauthorship saves When Titans Clashed from the worst of the usual criticisms of Glantz's writing, namely his dry "I have copy-pasted and translated this section of a Russian field manual" style. Get the 2015 edition, it's updated a lot from the 1995 edition and is probably easier to find anyway.
   
2. Smelser, Ronald M., and Edward J. Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 342 pages, hardback or paperback.
   I recommend this book as a companion to Titans, as the two of them dismantle many Western assumptions & myths about the so-called "Eastern Front," albeit from different angles. Where Titans presents a less Wehrmacht-centric perspective on the purely military aspects of that conflict and sheds light on the actual military skill of the Red Army, The Myth of the Eastern Front explains the origins of many of those assumptions and is really eye-opening. It's also pretty clean and easy to read, despite the length.
   
3. Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador, 2006. 462 pages, paperback, hardback, or audiobook.
   Ivan's War is a social history of the Red Army, told partly through interviews with veterans and civilians and partly through memoirs, and contextualized by improved access to archives during the post-Soviet, pre-current-unpleasantness era. It's easier to read and more empathetic than something more academically rigorous, like Roger Reese's Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941. If you're wondering what it was like to be an anonymous rifleman in the wartime Red Army, this is a good place to start. By dispelling the dehumanizing and racist narratives of some of the (largely Wehrmacht-influenced) Western writing on the Eastern Front, Ivan's War also rounds out a sort of mythbusting trilogy with Titans and Myth of the Eastern Front.