alt Hacker NewsTangential, but what resources would you recommend for learning world history (preferably including the non-Western world as well)?
For someone who is not aiming to be an expert or work with source records, but wants to improve their general awareness and erudition.
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Not even kidding - the AskHistorians reddit. I use their Sunday digest links as a magazine: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search/?q=title%3A%22...
It's filled in both so many gaps and made me increasingly curious about many periods/places that I previously felt disengaged about -- and led to much more reading of actual history
While I agree with the list of recommended podcasts, you may be a reader. It is easier for me to make notes and backup and review when reading. A good history book is a story book as interesting as any novel, with the added benefit of being about real people and events. Fortunately, there are a lot of good popular history authors, but unfortunately there are a lot of bad ones too. I looked at Goodreads and this list is pretty good:
I really like Crash Course World History. I'm older than the target demographic for this resource to be sure, but it's a great high level overview and having this under my belt helped me feel a little more oriented in every other historical thing I've dabbled in since.
There are so many good podcasts for this. Top of my list are Empire, Fall of Civilizations, The Age of Napoleon, The Rest is History, Saga Thing.
Getting a broad overview of "world history" is useful for having basic context for large events, but, IMHO, history gets so much more interesting and educational when you're deep into individual people's lives and stories. I'm probably a bit biased, but tend to agree with the suggestions that you pick a time and place and dive deep into an individual or event that catches your fancy.
My first BA was in history before I went into tech stuff.
It's honestly a hard question and depends on you. I think there's two core challenges: 1. What would be interesting to you and motivate you 2. Finding quality sources
The first one is easy but the second one is hard if you don't already know a fair amount of history, and there's tons of junk out there.
I'm admittedly pretty snobby on my sources but some recommendations (pick whatever works for you): - The Revolutions podcast is excellent. Made by the same guy as History of Rome - Unironically, the AskHistorians subreddit is a gem. It's hard to find questions with answers. Just search for their Sunday day of reflection posts. It's a compilation of interesting answers - If you're able to get into textbooks (not everyone is), do a search for an intro level textbook that's a short survey of an area/time. For example you find smallish intros to most regions and times from Cambridge
What are you interested in and how do you think you'd enjoy learning?
One more source to consider, if you find non-fiction dry (and if you do, I'd start by trying a different history book) is novels. Novelists like Rushdie, Heller, Solzhenitsyn, and a surprising number of sci-fi writers include a lot of history in their books. Clearly, these are not unbiased sources and can't be relied on as your only source, but often make for easy insightful introductions and/or immersive supplements. I'm not even talking about "historical fiction," though some of that is also good. For example, the book "The Killer Angels" about Gettysburg, is sometimes assigned reading in history classes.
Wanting to learn world history is like wanting to create one's own programming language.
A more feasible start would be to ask, "What is my world? What trends brought us here? When did they begin and how did they evolve?"
Wikipedia and the CNN and BBC.
Honestly, just start with Wikipedia. It's better than most popular books and completely free.
If you find yourself wanting something better, the next steps up are any of the numerous world history books from Oxford/Cambridge university presses. Beyond that you should really be picking more narrow areas/periods to go into.
It is, but it is a useful question. What you really want is not resources by being able to meet a threshold for:
- logic - critical thinking
After that, depending on your particular bent, you want some facility with languages ( some already dead ). In other words, it genuinely may not be for everyone.
Pick a country that you've been to, or want to visit, and delve deep into its history: wars, neighbors, food, culture. Personally I find that a lot more interesting than the broad survey-type podcasts and courses.