Let's say I wanted to test this theory and begin to address the deficiency. Anyone have some suggestions on where to start? What should I start reading?
And of course, there are the usual concerns about Eurocentrism and Great Man History. So follows the usual solutions. Don't make it the only thing you read, and don't stop meta-analyzing.
The podcast has the added benefit of being brief episodes, so you are quickly exposed to a variety of things you may want to explore more.
If you want to read some ancient philosophy directly, Plato's Symposium is a fun start. It is a bunch of guys staying up all night getting drunk and sharing their theories about love. And yet it is philosophy. Of course Socrates gets the last word---sort of. Also don't miss the point that one of the speeches is by Aristophanes, a comedian.
If it's the ancient Greek world that is inspiring you, maybe read Homer or Herodotus. Some quick notes there:
The Iliad - This takes place in the ninth year of the ten-year-long Trojan War. The Greeks are a loose alliance of kings, led by Agamemnon, who have sailed to Troy and are still trying to overcome its defenses. Their best warrior, Achilles, gets mad at Agamemnon and decides to quit fighting, and everything starts to fall apart. The poem is his story, although in many ways it is broader, covering lots of other heroes. So you have simultaneously the "big picture" of the war and the "little picture" of Achilles (plus some other major figures).
Most readers find this book more challenging than the Odyssey, because there is less fun adventure. It can be monotonous. It is chapter after chapter of "And X threw his bronze spear and it struck Y between the teeth and came out the back of his neck, and he fell into the dust and his armor clashed around him." But it may not be a bad monotony. Have you listened to Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Górecki? It is like that. But if you get to the end, and think about Achilles's story, it is so good.
The Odyssey - Now the Trojan War is over, and the heroes are going home. This is about how the Greek hero Odysseus gets lost, and spends another 10 years wandering. It spends some chapters on his wife and just-now-grown-up son, who are fending off the crowd of suitors who want to marry his wife and steal his estate. It follows Odysseus through his wild adventures---the most fun and memorable part of the book. And it tells of how he finally returns and defeats the suitors. (Contrary to what people usually remember, that is actually half the book.)
These books are striking in how opposite they are, and in many ways their style reflects their protagonist. Achilles is simple and straightforward, and the book is too. It has that monotony, and it basically starts at the beginning and plows forward to the end. Odysseus on the other hand is "wily" or "tricky", full of lies and schemes. (He was the inventor of the Trojan Horse.) And the book jumps all over, with flashbacks and stories-within-the-story. Multiple chapters are told by Odysseus himself. Coincidentally they are the most mythical, making you wonder if they are lies too. :-)
Some people even suggest that the first sentence---maybe even the first word---of each poem contains the rest of the story. For the Iliad it is Achilles's μῆνιν: wrath (or maybe sullenness---he is practically a teenager (or was when he came to Troy)). For the Odyssey it's ἄνδρα: the man: Odysseus.
For Homer there are lots of translations. Lattimore is great and close to the Greek, but I find Fitzgerald's to be the most enjoyable. He gives up some precision to get more poetry, and it's like reading to a soundtrack.
The Histories of Herodotus are fun too, but more history than literature. If you get The Landmark Herodotus, the maps and notes help a lot. I would just be aware of what you're reading: ostensibly this is a history of the Persian War, and that is the thread that connects everything together (like Achilles in the Iliad), but Herodotus's main movement is the digression. Chapter 2 is all about Egypt (its history, culture, etc.). Chapter 3 is all about the East. Chapter 4 is all about Scythia. You get the idea. It's like he is trying to catalog everything known or said about the world around him.
Herodotus was part of a "rationalist" movement in ancient Greece, along with the early philosophers. He is one of the first to write in prose instead of poetry. He is called the First Historian in part because he gives his sources. Sometimes he'll give several versions of something, and leave it up to you to decide. But that doesn't mean he is rational by our standards. There are plenty of myths and legends and wild stories. You will need some patience to finish this book, and a guide would help to draw out the gems, but it is pretty wonderful if you're paying attention.
Good luck, and enjoy your reading! :-)
I can't say much about world history, but I've been reading some books to get a better understanding of American politics:
- "War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires": Interesting analysis on the rise and fall of conquering civilizations. Tons of parallels between dead empires and the US empire.
- "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": Nations are built on cities, and America's cities are very poorly built. What are we doing wrong, what could we do better?
- "The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War": Very dense, lots of data. Suggests that our current political turmoil is due to our economy and society expecting unrealistic growth, and a disconnect between reality and the expectation of citizens.
- The Origins of Totalitarianism: "Slippery slope" gets thrown around a lot w.r.t. suspicious legislation. This book provides context on past societies that slipped, and where we stand on that slope.
- "Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization": Optimistic look at the future of globalism.
- "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed": An analysis of the cascade failure that took out almost all the great bronze-age civilizations around the Mediterranean region in 1177BC.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" - I haven't read this, but this is the #1 book that pops up in conversations.
I don't even know what I'm looking for. So, on some level I'm looking to begin addressing my broad ignorance of human history, and then see where that takes me.
It is literally what it says in the title. He's a travel writer so has a very narrative and readable style. Wow just thinking about it now makes me amazed at what he achieved in that book.
Luckily, some have been made readily available on the internet. Here is The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis by him, which I think would be one of the best starting points for your type of historical curiosity.
http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Carroll-Quigley-TheEvoluti...
Here's an example of one that stuck in my memory recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5f86lb/what_...
I feel that an honest lad shouldn't touch History (What happened?) without first wrapping is head around Historiography: Who's writing That History? Is there any conflict of interest in writing process?.
To that end, the single best book I can recommend is Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield's The Discovery of Time, published in 1965.
We take it for granted that we live in a dynamic changing universe with growth and development, but for most of human history in most cultures the opposite was true: The world was static, most change was a fall from a previous high, people's places were fixed, time was fixed, the world was fixed.
(I'm not sweeping aside creation myths, because in most myths the world was created at a specific time to be exactly as it is right now and as it will be forever or until the end, depending on the myth. Static, no change, no development.)
A few centuries ago, there began serious intellectual and philosophical investigation into the possibly of changing time, of a dynamic universe, of serious consideration of the possibility the universe had a beginning outside of religious creationism. Over time, the notion that time itself changed seeped through and into all thinking.
Without that change in perspective, Darwin and others might never have done their work....
What I find personally most interesting is trying to shift my head to imagine what it would have been like to live in a world with static time in an Earth-centric universe.
That exercise is the most eye-popping of all, IMHO.
As an aside, over the decades my interest/fascination in history has waxed and waned, in part because there is simply so much to read, so much to learn, that it can be overwhelming. Consider the simple fact of the millions of stories in WWII alone, and one can easily imagine spending a lifetime learning more and more about a single period, a single event, and never learn it all.
Every now and again I'll plunge into an area of interest, either through a maze of Wikipedia articles or a really good book (Team of Rivals; Churchill's memoirs of WWII; Paris 1919; etc.), but overall I prefer those works that challenge me to change my intellectual and artistic perspective (Age of Insight, about Vienna, is good for that).
But realistically you have to get closer. Pick a time period, or a theme, or even an individual, and start digging. Some people like local or family history. Try to find a selection of voices to read, but beware of the pseudohistorians and pop-scientists.
"There are more than 1,500 objects in all, and although the most precious items aren’t here (they are under lock-and-key elsewhere), the scale of the task she faces to preserve and publish these objects is nearly overwhelming. She surveys the room: a life’s work mapped out before her."
This is a drawing of what it looks like in the grave:
http://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/871131223215308800/1024/10...
2. to apply laboratory tech, you're not going to bring an electron microscope or an NMR spectrometer down a pit
3. to keep the artefacts from spoiling further
4. because spoilage of the artefacts will speed up once they're uncovered and exposed to the elements
5. to avoid thefts and secreting of the artefacts in private collections
6. because the state would have to confiscate all dig sites rather than temporary make them off-limits, which people already react to quite badly (especially when the dig site is a construction site which is rather common, look up "rescue archaeology")
