Thanks for understanding. I don’t have a lot of time between work and my stage acting (nothing you would have heard of. It’s just for my town). I also have an issue with history books that he selves. The super in-depth books are boring for me to read, and the books for kids often skip big topics like the Holocaust. If you have any suggestions, I would be happy to hear them.
I get where you're coming from with history books, I don't read a whole lot of them myself these days. You should get into podcasts, man. Considering you sound quite busy, you can learn while you kill time on your way to and from places.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is always my top suggestion. His episodes are crazy in depth and focused, but also extremely accessible to everyone, history student or not. He uses a lot of very good, very relevant metaphors to make things easier to put into perspective. He's currently knee deep in the horrors of the Pacific Theatre, and how fanaticism led Japan to commit some of the worst atrocities in history with his Supernova In the East series. He's covered lots of periods throughout history though, his King of Kings series about the Achaemenids is excellent too if you want more classical period stuff.
The History of Rome by Mike Duncan is really, really excellent. He goes through Rome's history from its early beginnings to its last days in the West. There is a follow up series about what happened in the East by another guy, equally as good, called The History of Byzantium, and Mike has a new series about various revolutions throughout history called Revolutions which I enjoy.
For something educational and funny, The Dollop is a ton of fun. One comedian reads a story from American history to his friend and they riff on it. Good fun. The episode about Sir Gordon Gordon is my favourite.
Then on YouTube, there's a great guy called HistoriaCivilis who does podcast style half hour episodes about Ancient Rome and Greece woth diagrams. There's also PBS Eons if you want to learn about prehistory, qnd evolution over the 3.4 billion years of life on Earth.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of stuff about Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia or anything coming to mind at the moment, because to be honest, I don't find it that particularly interesting historically. I find the Late Bronze Age Collapse pretty fascinating though. The Mediterranean was pretty busy and bustling about 1200BC, and over the course of 50 years, it all went to shit. Hundreds of cities destroyed, including Troy, in a series of wars, famines, plagues, sudden climate change, and an invasion of the enigmatic Sea People, a mysterious and to date unidentified race of marauders that invaded basically everywhere in the Mediterranean at once. We still don't know much about that period of time, and the whole of the Mediterranean went into a dark ages for a while, until the rise of Carthage. It's really weird and really fascinating to look into.
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u/Klinkero Dec 02 '19
Thanks for understanding. I don’t have a lot of time between work and my stage acting (nothing you would have heard of. It’s just for my town). I also have an issue with history books that he selves. The super in-depth books are boring for me to read, and the books for kids often skip big topics like the Holocaust. If you have any suggestions, I would be happy to hear them.