[rosetremiere]

As far as I understand, Ian Morris's books are not taken very seriously in the academic world. I've read the first part of /Why the West rules/ and must admit that it reads a bit like trying to push a narrative: spinning up facts the right way to make them support his ideas and asserting universal truths without much backing… but I think I'm biased by the reviews I checked before reading the (first part of the) book.

[cnity]

Genuine question: I've heard this criticism for literally every pop-history book I've read (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Sapiens; The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, etc). Are there any history books that are taken seriously in the academic world that are actually fun to read? If so, any recommendations? If not, is the issue basically that if you want some history book to be fun, you've got to make some interesting speculations along the way?

[Unearned5161]

I am really enjoying Crucible of War by Fred Anderson, it's about the 7 year war (1756-1763?) and essentially how it lay the pretext for the American War of Independence but is often overlooked by modern teaching. For me it strikes the right balance for something that has citations for almost everything, but at the same time is fluid to read and you can get into a groove with his battle and scene descriptions. He also manages to deal with bias rather well, which is a tricky thing to do and is what many books that you cite have struggled with (that and rigor of writing), especially when dealing with the assymetry of information available about the time (much more writings from the British/french side than the Indian). He includes this fact in his writing so that you don't get the impression that this is the whole picture. One more thing I see as another potential folly for many pophistory books is breadth. Many tend to take much to big a bite of history and attempt to get it all in ~800 pages, that's not going to happen unless you do some major glossing over at some parts. A book that's considered "good history" I've noticed will be shorter in focus length (not to be confused with book length), if the author wants to write about a whole century or two, they'll split it up into several books. Overall I think it's a great book for someone that wants to get into more rigorous historical text. And I think it's important to remember that not everything has to be fun, in the end what we're doing is reading past events, some events are going to be interesting to you, others not so much. Find your interests and read history books about that, it'll do some of the "fun to read" legwork.

[gbear605]

Not a book, but acoup.blog has lots of well sourced, fun to read, articles by a history professor. The academic response to them has been positive from what I’ve seen.

[algon33]

Didn't the author say that he's writing to push an agenda? Anyway, it is a fantastic blog.

[rosetremiere]

It's a question I share, so I'm happy to see answers popping up.

As for my personal experience, I've read parts of "Philosophy before the Greeks. The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia" and "A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000 - 323 B.C" by Marc van de Mieroop and have quite enjoyed both. They both seem to have favourable reviews.

[teh_klev]

See also Bill Bryson. I think it's a bit unfair to criticise these types of books for not being 100% academically rigorous (having citations etc). They're generally ok as entertaining introductions to new subject matter for the reader. After that the reader can then go looking for more authoritative writings of the topics being explored that tickle their fancy.

[rosetremiere]

I don't have a strong opinion on the subject, but I believe/hope it should be possible to be accessible and entertaining while still being academically "acceptable" in terms of references (which doesn't need to be of the form 1 claim, 1 reference) and without taking misleading shortcuts or trying to sell your new universal theory of history, but sticking to consensual understandings and/or prefacing your novel ideas adequately.

I guess it sells better if you can make your audience believe that your theory explains "everything". Having read the book, it's a better feeling to think that you now understand the gears of history through this new lens, rather than it being just a complex jumble of interconnected stories/phenomena.

[teh_klev]

> it's a better feeling to think that you now understand the gears of history through this new lens

This is the thing, there's no harm in reading something like this where the author may be "pushing a narrative", but so long as the reader maintains a modicum of critical thinking I see no harm.

[dr_dshiv]

Maybe sell a footnoted version at twice the price? Footnotes can scare regular readers.

[sndean]

Books by Adrian Goldsworthy are well received in academic journals, as far as I've seen. Especially his long book on Caesar. Not sure whether they'd be labeled universally as fun to read, though. But if you want history books focused on Rome, they're pretty accessible and apparently taken seriously enough.

[uberdru]

I always cite Jaynes' book as having the best title of all time. A good antidote to Sapiens, in particular, is "Against the Grain" by James Scott, who (as was Jaynes) is at Yale. It's a survey of recent archeology and anthropology that has great new evidence and novel interpretations of old evidence. Very accessible and highly recommended.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300240214/against-grain/

[NoGravitas]

I would recommend "The Dawn of Everything", by David Graeber (cultural anthropologist) and David Wengrow (archaeologist). It's written for a popular audience, but mainly complicates the type of narrative that pop history books tend to push.

[Mlller]

What about Mommsenʼs History of Rome (itʼs actually only about the Roman Republic, he didnʼt finish planned further volumes):

- On the one hand, Mommsen was a professional historian and his work was (and is[1]) highly acclaimed. [2] cites: “Equally great as antiquary, jurist, political and social historian, Mommsen lived to see the time when among students of Roman history he had pupils, followers, critics, but no rivals. He combined the power of minute investigation with a singular faculty for bold generalization and the capacity for tracing out the effects of thought on political and social life.”

- On the other hand, his History of Rome got the nobel prize for literatur, so at least some people found it fun to read, too. Again from [2]: “Its sureness of touch, its many-sided knowledge, its throbbing vitality and the Venetian colouring of its portraits left an ineffaceable impression on every reader.” “It was a work of genius and passion, the creation of a young man, and is as fresh and vital to-day as when it was written.”

Itʼs freely available at Project Gutenberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome_(Mommsen)#Exte...

[1] “Still read and qualifiedly cited” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome_(Mommsen)#firs...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Rome_(Mommsen)#1902...

[sharatvir]

1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann are pretty good for pre and post Columbian Exchange history of the americas and the world

[PaulDavisThe1st]

There's a bit of a generic problem here. "Pop-history" books generally need to be based around some sort of narrative - it's what primarily distinguishes them from their "purely academic" cousins. But the problem that the academic world often has with them is not the facts they contain, but the fact that they try to spin a narrative that the academic world doesn't yet feel "full" consensus on.

Consequently, if you're an author seeking to be absolutely fidelious to the known facts about some period of history somewhere, but nevertheless desire to spin a narrative from them, then frequently no matter what that narrative might be, you're crossing a line that many in academia don't think you should cross.

[JasonFruit]

Is it true, though, that academic works don't spin a narrative? That's a large part of what historians do: attempt to reconstruct a consistent version of events, what caused them to occur as they did, and what their effects were — in short, construct a coherent narrative. There might be a difference in emphasis on the average, with pop history focusing more on the narrative and less on facts that might be inconvenient to it, but some of the best and most influential rigorous historical works are those that present an interpretation of historical events that requires reevaluation of the narrative of preceding work.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I think the academic tone is closer to:

"Event A happened. Event B happened. Event C happened. In that order. Perhaps that means X"

The pop-history tone is closer to:

"Historical character M had plans to N, inspired by O. This is supported by the evidence we have for events A, B and C."

[AlotOfReading]

Academic works almost always advance arguments. "X is correct because we can see A, B, and people would have understood that in light of C. Critics will point out Y, which is addressed by D, E, and F".

There's no firm line between scholarly and pop history other than the reputation and credibility of the work, which often isn't obvious to lay readers.

[maratc]

> "Event A happened. Event B happened. Event C happened. In that order. Perhaps that means X"

That's both academic and pop-history, where a better representation would be "A gazillion different events happened but let's talk about events A, B, and C." It's impossible to talk about all the events that happened, so everyone needs to select the "important" ones. Of course when selecting what's "important" the bias is employed. It's not uncommon to reach different conclusions when looking at certain events (while disregarding others).

[pyuser583]

Modern historians are very cynical towards “big history” - grand narratives that explain everything.

Real history is weird and full of exceptions.

The sorts of books that are popular with both historians and the public focus on sepecific events in lots of detail: “Krakatoa: The Day the World Erupted” for example.

[ryantgtg]

The Dawn of Everything.

I’m reading it now. Probably not as fun as the others you mentioned. But so far it’s very enlightening.

[eushebdbsh]

adam tooze has a great book called the deluge

[algon33]

Gunpowder and galleys is a book on naval history that is highly rated and highly readable. It was written for historians, and changed the fields understanding of why galleys eventually lost out to sailing ships in naval warfare.

------------------------------------------ The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a massive tome written by an American reporter who lived through the eponymous era. It has a great deal of detail which I had never heard of before, and shaped my understanding of WW2. It is also quite moralising, maintaining that Nazi Germany was inevitable because of a servile German character, that the depravity of the SS was in part due to their homosexual deviancy, and a little too focused on the personalities of individuals. Admittedly, the last part is quite interesting. Why do I still recommend it? Because I think there is enough depth there, and enough of a distinction in the text between the author's theories and the facts, that you can learn a great deal from it.

For instance, the sheer stupid chance that led to him waging such terrible war. How so many men could have prevented his rise to power. He might have died a soldier in the first world war, or the French or English could have crushed his open violations of the peace treaties, or how his takeover of multiple nations was facilitated by the petty racism of British diplomats. There's also detail concering the poltical, economic and social factors that allowed this chance to exist in the first place. Like the disconnect between the German military and the Weimar Republic who they were sworn to protect, or the war-weariness of Western Europe which was partially responsible for their leaders to continually cede ground to a madman who publically outlined his plans to genocide entire peoples. ------------------------------------------ The 10,000 Year Explosion is not widely accepted by academics, but is not widely panned either. And whilst it does seem to over-play its thesis, the core idea is quite sound: evolution still applies to modern humans, and the rapid growth of the species over the past 10k years has allowed for a great deal more variation and selection to occur, and as such we should see far more changes in human biology now than throughout the average 10k period of history. The exact mutations described and the hypothesis for why they occured are, of course, more conentious. I don't have much of a general opinion, as the authors go through a wide variety of population differences like lactose intolerance, diease immunity, hearing adaptations due to language use and, yes, IQ. The depth and quality of research on these varies, so the reliability of conclusions in the book does too. ------------------------------------------ "The Dawn of Everything" covers some interesting anthropological data, but the reviews I've read paint a poor picture of the author's interpretation of what the data means. Whilst it points to an important idea, that the human transition to agriculture was not nearly as sharp or uniform as is popularly believed, I think you'd be better served by reading this page on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity and reading some of the cited papers and authors' works.

[tombh]

It's actually at the top of Reddit's r/AskHistorians recommended reading list[1]. And I in fact ended up choosing to read it instead of Guns, Germs and Steel after enough comments there suggested to me that it was more deeply based in academia.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/timi4/the_as...

[easytiger]

It's actually at the top of Reddit's r/AskHistorians recommended reading list

That settles the matter then

> was more deeply based in academia.

You surely can't read the above article and believe that?

[tombh]

I feel like you might not be that familiar with r/AskHistorians? It is the least reddit-like part of Reddit, it has extremely high standards and is rigorously moderated. Here are the most notable critical threads on Guns, Germs and Steel[1]. Just because Why The West Rules For Now might seem to be preferred by them doesn't necessarily speak to its reputation, seeing as GGS apparently sets such a low bar.

I don't see any problems with Ian Morris' article here. He is a writer, as well as an academic. The audience for the article seems to be for well-informed, non-specialised intellectuals. As such the article seems well pitched.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

[ghaff]

Why the West Rules for Now seemed to make a good case (by my reading) for geographical determinism (i.e. Jared Diamond's thesis) being part of the story but not all of it given the ups and downs of the western and eastern cores over the millennia. I'm not sure he really answered the question at the end of the day--beyond Europe was in the right place at the right time for the Industrial Revolution to happen--but maybe that's pretty much the reality.

[mc32]

I can't speak to this author or any of the assertions therein, however, Israeli archeologists seem to have found evidence of controlled fire circa 1MM years ago in what is now Israel. So proto-humans have been out of Africa in waves since the beginning of our lineage.

[easytiger]

The writing quality in this article would suggest he is indeed a pretty poor hack. I'd be embarrassed to call myself a professional author if this is how i wrote

> Like all scientific laws, Thatcher’s has exceptions. Britain has not really “always been” in Europe, because there has not always been a Europe to be in. Our planet has existed for 4.6 billion years, but shifting continental plates only began creating what we now call Europe about 200 million years ago.

- a "scientifc law" (nope!) you invented in the previous paragraph predicated on a blatantly incorrect interpretation of a statement someone made about something unrelated to whatever you are talking about

> Britain has not really “always been” in Europe, because there has not always been a Europe to be in. Our planet has existed for 4.6 billion years, but shifting continental plates only began creating what we now call Europe about 200 million years ago.

- North America was also in Pangea. So what? I can't tell if this is failed wit or failed attempts at engineering some kind of moral highground based on geography?

All that before you mention the pompous political shoehorning.

I should have kept the writing up if this meets a publisher's standards