Certainly, Shelby Foote's trilogy on the Civil War would have to rank right up there.

Schama, Schama, Schama.
If you must restrict yourself to one, "Citizens" it is.
As an aside, Schama is certainly no right-winger or friend of GWB.  But with just a little tweaking/slanting, "Citizens" could be cast as the most anti-French book of all time -  if "French" is taken to mean "pretensions to intellectual/moral superiority." Certainly that's how his book was received when it was first published.

Apologies for the screwy html.  Haven't gotten the hang of this, obviously. 

<strong class="sans">Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West, by Edward Rice</strong><br />

<p><span class="sans">Culture and History in Medieval Iceland: An Anthropological Analysis of Structure and Change</span><strong class="sans"> </strong>by  <a target="_self" href="/comments/2005/6/10/12391/7823//">Kristen Hastrup</a></p><p>Fantastic book about the development of Iceland and its colonization.&nbsp; Also amazing for its use of sociology to describe the differences between pre-Christian and Christian Iceland.&nbsp; You won't be disappointed.<br /> </p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author-exact=Kristen%20Hastrup/002-9133247-7016813"></a>

Hi,

As an avid TPM reader, I just thought some of you may be interested in helping us with a petition site that several of us former Wes Clark campaign staff members just put it. Its an email petition to Senators urging them to vote against John Bolton. I hope you check it out:

www.StopJohnBolton.com

Thanks!

take care,

Aaron

M by Peter Robb. It's a biography of Caravaggio, so not strictly history. But the detailed recounting of day to day life, church politics and social structure in late 16th / early 17th century Italy is remarkable.

I have a special fondness for the 18th century social history -- any culture.  But truthfully, I really like biographies of historical figures and social histories of just about any era.

A Coffin For King Charles by C.V. Wedgwood, about the trial and execution of King Charles I, is a fascinating history with a very compressed time span.  Another of my favorites is The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith, about Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, the cavalry leaders at the center of the Charge of the Light Brigade.  I got both of them as part of a whole series of Time-Life books that I picked up at a local surplus store for like a dollar apiece.  They appear to have been part of some sort of a book-of-the-month club, and every one of them has been excellent, ranging from books about the Inuit, to the Korean War, to the Pilgrims, to the one I'm reading right now, Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865, which I'm enjoying even though I've never been much of a Civil War guy.

I just wanted to add that the 1799 French invasion of Ireland referenced in my short review actually happened.

The Conquest of New Spain a great 1st person account of the "conquest" of Mexico by Bernal Diaz  and the unmissiable classic trilogy by Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind. This trilogy is about the history of the new world from the beginning of time until the 1980's.Atmospheric, poetic, whip smart and moving. Required reading for any true citizen of the Americas. 

I think Josh mentioned the Diaz book about a year ago on TPM.  Fascinating.  A more up-to-date and very detailed (a little too detailed for me) history of the Spanish invasion of Mexico is "Conquest" by Hugh Thomas.
Probably my favorite, non-academic, easy reading history is "The Fatal Shore" on the founding of Australia.  Absolutely loved that book when I read it about 10 years ago.

Two of my favorite books are about economic history:
The Weath and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some are So Poor by David S. Landes.  He's at an age where he can follow his interests freely and it is fun for the reader to tag along.  
Another favorite is A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy by James Macdonald.  He's a good writer.  It's amazing how readable a book about "national debt" can turn out to be.  It includes a number of interesting mini-histories of particular debt situations.

Thucydides. Distant runner-ups would be The Coming of the French Revolution and The Guns of August.

1. its half 19th/half 20th century, but Enrique Krauze's Mexico: A
Biography is a model of easily accesible political history that still provides insights of the highest order.

2. Peter Green's Alexander to Actium, on the Hellenistic world, can be dauntingly encyclopedic in its scope, but it contains so much good stuff and is written so well I can recommend it without reservation.

3. Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, on how what we think of as a sort of immutable French culture and nationality was only recently grafted onto much of the populace during the nineteenth century, often through government programs.

4. Roy Jenkins' Gladstone. Written with an easy grace and humor, it opens up to us a figure that in many ways seems so near to the current day in many of his principles and actions, yet whose entire outlook and intellectual foundation is utterly strange to us.

5. Just picked it up, but Mark Mazower's Salonlika looks pretty good on first perusal.  

Must respectfully disagree. Schama makes some very good points and I learned a lot. My problem with 'Citizens' is that:

• it does not present the Revolution as a narrative, meaning there is no individual or idea that ties the story together. Understandable since life expectancy of the leadership was quite short and the Revolution had many phases, but it does make it more difficult.
  
• its not written for someone without prior knowledge of the French Revolution because it explains events with cursory mentions to the subsequent events of which I am still ignorant. That's why I reading this summary in the first place!

After 600 pages, I was begging for the next 200 to go by, so I can't recommend it.

Gibbon is tough to beat for style and content, and TDAFOTRE is so long that you can go back over and over again and still pick up something new!

Laurent Dubois's A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 is one of the best written histories that I have recently read because it manages to artfully combine insightful and complex analyses of French national rhetoric with a captivating but ultimately heartbreaking narrative of the emancipation of French Carribbean slaves in the early years of the Revolution and their eventual reenslavement by Napoleon's government.  Unlike most works on abolitionism and independence in the Carribbean, this book doesn't focus on Haiti, preferring to tell the story of smaller (but perhaps more important) French Islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. 

I've always been on the lookout for "niche" history books so here are a couple of my recent finds.

"The Battle that Stopped Rome" by Peter Wells is the history of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in which Germanic warriors massacred three Roman legions.  The loss was so great that Augustus ordered an end to Roman territorial expanison.

"When Jesus Became God" by Richard Rubenstein looks at the struggle between followers of Arius and Athanasius to define the divinity of Jesus in the fourth Century.  That was a time when theological issues were literally fought out in the street.

"Many Thousands Gone" by Ira Berlin is the history of American slavery from the beginning until the 1840's.  It's thoughtful, deeply researched and pulls no punches.  This book, and "Trouble in Mind" a history of Jim Crow by Leon Litwack,  were invaluable to me when I moved to the Deep South.

I'll second The Fatal Shore and throw in Hughes' Barcelona as well. Fernand Braudel's works Civilization and Capitalism (3 vols.) are a masterpiece- I was forced to read Immanuel Wallerstien's books on the same subject in grad school, which just proved all the dense prose and theoretical jargon in the world can't beat a good narrative structure.
I just finished Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World which does an excellent job of looking at Temujin's early life and how it shaped his worldview and move to conquest, though it leans a bit hagiographic in dealing with the brutality of the Mongol campaigns, it does point out the encouragement of trade and religious toleration that made the Mongols ahead of their time.

For anyone interested in a particularly brutal and divisive era of English history, I'd recommend Alison Weir's "The Wars of the Roses."  It helps readers sort through the thicket of claims and counter-claims that the House of Lancaster and the House of York made to the throne of England. 

I enjoyed "The Trial of Gilles de Rais" by Georges Bataille. Based on trial transcripts of the most infamous villian of the Middle Ages.

I'm sure you and all of your vry astuter readers have already gotten around to all of the biographies on T.E. Lawrence, but I would suggest they are worth a second look.  The politics and strategies of the countries involved is fascinating to me.
His autobiography "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" is a might muddled, but interesting nonetheless.

"Islands of History", Marshall Sahlins.

Captain Cook and Hawaii. Sahlins argues that by by the time that  Captain Cook was killed, he had become an integral part of the Hawaiian political system, and that he was killed not as a foreign invader, but for the same partly-ritual reasons that they killed many of their indigenous chiefs. 

Also includes the story of a Hawaiian queen who estimated that she had had over fifty husbands.

Rather like early Iceland, Hawaii was something of a counterexample to the Hobbesian notion of the nasty, brutish state of nature. They were extremely violent societies, but with many compensatory good things.

Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate.  This is a meticulously researched and beautifully written portrait of life among the Russian nobility prior to the l9l7 revolution.  Also, staying in eastern Europe, Charles Jelavich, South Slav Nationalisms.  Jelavich is one half of the great Jelavich duo, who wrote most of the fundamental books on Yugoslavia and the Balkans in the l970s and 80s.  Here, he looks at several generations of textbooks used in the south Slavic lands and demonstrates that however much people talked about one, harmonious Yugoslav people, none of the constituent groups was ever much interested.  Essential for those hoping to understand Yugoslavia's violent 20th century.  

"The Kingdom of the Sun" by John Julius Norwich.  About the time that the Normans conquered England in 1066 they also invaded and conquered Sicily and established the Norman kingdom of the two Sicilies on the island and in southern Italy. 

In the 1100s and early 1200s the Normans established and ran an amazing rich polyglot kingdom with enlightened (for the time) laws and religious tolerance.  There was a great floresence of art and architecture.  The population was a mix of Italian, Byzantine Greek, and Arabs.  Ironically, the Arabs were the most reliable portion of the population for stability and there are amazing stories of Norman knights leading armies that were 75% Arabs into Italy to subdue rebellious Italian towns.  Also fascinating pictures of Roman Catholic cathederals built in Arabic architectural style that have Byzantine Greek mosaics on the walls as well as the Lord's Prayer engraved in the wall in Arabic.
 
Fun and fascinating stuff

I'd echo the recommendations for "Citizens," "Guns, Germs, and Steel," and even though it violates the no-American history rule, Vidal's "Lincoln" is one of the best historical novels I've ever read (Richard Slotkin's "Abe" is a worthwhile companion piece).  

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is an excellent guide for exploring historical roads less travelled.

I also enjoyed Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror," and, more recently, Orlando Fige's "Natasha's Dance."

Three books meeting Josh's criteria:

Siamese White, Maurice Collis, 1935:  Story of an Englishman named Samuel White, appointed Governor of the port of Mergui in Burma (but then in Thailand) in the early 1680s by his friend Constantine Phaulkon, a Greek character who had, roughly speaking, been appointed Prime Minister of Siam.  White proceeds to rob his employers, launch pirate attacks on the British East India Company across the bay, and flee for his life from the irate Siamese and Brits. Elihu Yale, founder of the college, makes a brief but memorable appearance as a jewelry swindler.

Historical Records, Sima Qian, 90 BC:  the first major work of Chinese history, translated beautifully by Burton Watson in a short and long version, tells the story of the rise and collapse of China's first imperial dynasty.  Sima has a humane moral vision, a vast series of colorful anecdotes and personalities, and an extraordinary personal story. 

1066:  Year of the Conquest, David Howart, 1979?:  a short and fascinating look at William, Harold, Tostig and Harald Hardrada, along with supporting cast including Pope Hildebrand, Edwawrd the Confessor and the rest.  "I would have liked Harold, been utterly terrified of Duke William, and had nothing whatsoever to say to King Harald Hardraada of Norway."

The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius, 110 AD:  sort of the People Magazine version of Roman history.  Nero's taste in interior decorating, Tiberius as the "gloomiest man in the world," Caesar's baldness, etc.

The Galleys at Lepanto by Jack Beeching

 A ripping good yarn about the crucial 1571 battle.  The subject still echoes today.

For the French Revolution, I prefer the late Francois Furet's Revolutionary France: 1770-1880 to Schama.  If anyone wants a little historiography to go along with their history, Furet's Interpreting the French Revolution would do nicely as well.

For ancient history, it's hard to do better than Thucydides or Gibbon, as others have already said.  I also enjoy Arrian on Alexander the Great and, to pick a modern author, almost anything by Peter Brown on late antiquity.   If I had to chose, I'd go with Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity or the collection of essays, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity.  For those new to the period, his more popular work, The World of Late Antiquity, 150-750, may be of more interest.  All are beautifully written, and the last has many terrific photographs of late Roman and early Christian art.

Final recommendations, to get away from the political or social history side: Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages.  Two classic works that deserve to be read again and again.   Oh heck, one more: a masterful look at how historians through the modern era approached art and artefacts as evidence, Francis Haskell's History and Its Images.  As with the Peter Brown, there's a heavy debt here to the work of Arnaldo Momgliano.

If you're not quite up to reading Thuycides (sp?) try "The Peloponnesian War" by Donal Kagan. 
Also, I'll recommend again "The Trial of Socrates" by I.F. Stone. I read Plato's Republic a long time ago (I think high school but it could have been college) and always wondered why it was so revered. My reaction was that it was the perfect primer for a Hitler or Stalin. Years later reading Stone I finally realized that that was a reasonable reaction to Plato. Stone shows the proper amount of disrepect for Socrates and Plato who were the ultra-right wingnuts of their day and explains why the execution of Socrates seemed like a rational response to the contempary Greeks. This is a book which gave me a certain amount of courage to form my own opinions even when I disagreed with the near unanimous convention wisdom. (It may also be the only history book with a special shout out to the Macintosh in the dedication which as a Mac user I loved.) 
Finally, a book I am about 1/3 of the way through but so far is great - "The First Crusade" by Thomas Asbridge. Very relevant but utterly foreign to contempary experience. I consider myself pretty well read but I learn something new (and interesting and important) on every page.

I was assigned to read The Armada in college, and did so reluctantly, since I didn't care about the topic at all. But I was almost stunned at how good it was. That a European historian could write well was something I hadn't considered possible.

I have to agree that Sobel's "Longitude" is a great book. The fact that it canbe read in one sitting mad eit all the more pleasurable.

Agree on The Black Jacobins--Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, by C.L.R. James; and the three-volume Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian (translated by Burton Watson).

Capitalism and Slavery, by Eric Williams.

Strangers at the Gate--Social Disorder in South China 1839-1861, by Frederic Wakeman Jr.

Russia and Britain in Persia, 1864-1914--A Study in Imperialism, by Firuz Kazemzadeh.

 

"The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire:  From the First Century A.D. to the Third" by Edward N. Luttwak.  This is the finest 200 page book on geopolitical strategy around.   The book was written 30 years ago during the Cold War, but still reads as if sections were written specifically to address modern strategic issues.  Rome was the first 'hyperpower' and ruled vast areas of land through the use of financial, military, diplomatic, psychological, and cultural levers.  A brilliant work by a writer I sometimes disagree with, but never discount.  

Pagans and Christians, by Robin Lane Fox

The End of Ancient Christianity, by Robert Markus

The Other Greeks, by Victor Davis Hansen*

(more elementary) The World of Late Antiquity, by Peter Brown

*Many years ago I knew and rather liked Victor.  I also admire some of the things he has written on California and rural America; I find his recent stuff on current affairs and the boilerplate military/cultural stuff repugnant.  But The Other Greeks is a great antidote to a lot of our casual assumptions. 

Someone up above mentioned Wedgewood's "A Coffin for King Charles."  It is actually the conclusion of a trilogy about the English Civil War that begins with "The King's Peace" and "the King's War."   Superb narrative history.

I also have very fond memories of "The Lion and the Throne" by Catherine Drinker Bowen.  It is a biography of the Elizabethian jurist Lord Coke, but it is really a story about the protestant-catholic struggles, their political context, and how they affected the development of legal protections for individuals in ways that remain with us.  Absolutely terrific stuff.  And the portraits of prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges lead one to the conclusion that the various personality types have not changed since 1600. 

Well, sort of 'not American' and definitely pre 20th-century try Daniel Boorstein's "The Discoverers".

P.S. Off-topic to this thread but Boorstein's 3-volume history of the U.S. was required reading for me in college and was instrumental in opening up the entire field for me personally. 

Thanks for the mention of Crane Brinton's wonderful book.  I had forgotten the title, but not the author's first name.

Had to read it in a Western Civ class in the early 80s.  Loved it.

A few history book suggestions:

 There is nothing like Gerhard Weinberg’s “A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.” 

 Just about everything by Hugh Thomas is notable.  But I particularly like: “Rivers of Gold, The Rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan”; “The Slave Trade”; and “The Spanish Civil War.”

 Geoff Eley’s “Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000” is an important, but demanding, read.

 Orlando Figes, who was mentioned earlier, “A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924” taught me a lot.

 The late Roy Porter was one of my favorite historians.  Everyone should read his near masterpiece “The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity.”

 I almost forgot Albert Hourani, “A History of the Arab Peoples,” which puts the current ‘mess o potomia’ in a broad perspective.

An excellent introduction/reintroduction to the northern Enlightenment and the political and social thinkers who most directly influenced our Founding Fathers:
How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Arthur Herman, Crown, 2001.

And, for the generation that followed: Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, Adam Zamoyski, Viking, 1999.

The end of the Hapsburgs the rise of the radical right and left, art, culture, modernity: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Carl E. Schorske, Knopf,1980

Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake — probably the best book out there on the experience of the Protestant and Catholic reformations.  It’s insightful and reads well.

The Tale of Genji my Murasaki Shikibu is one of my favorite historical novels. There are two translations that I am aware of readily available; one by Edward Seidenstecker, the other by Royall Tyler. Each is very different and comparing them can be enlightening. I read Seidenstecker in College and still feel it is the best.

I would recommend George Williams' The Radical Reformation, which provides a panoramic view of the 16th century ferment within European Protestantism that produced the Anabaptists, the Spiritualists, and the Unitarians--all of which subsequently influenced American religious life. 

  Not enough of a connoisseur of history books to be able to say how this stacks up against other account but - I just read a fascinating biography of Matilda of Canossa (Tuscan Countess: The life and extraordinary times of…). Seems that the person credited with founding modern law, Irnerius, did so because she sent him to Bolognia to review and teach Roman law because it was where the only remaining copy resided of the Justinian handbook containing the code of civil law that defined rights and obligations between the state and its citizens. OK, here is what makes it even more interesting - the reason she did this first and foremost was to legitimize her own inheritance rights - under feudalism, women could not own property. After her father's death she had been married off for political reasons to a hunchback she couldn't stand and whom she left - but after he died, her father's lands going to the German Kings. So she had also allied herself with the pope Gregory the VII against the Henry the IVth.   To make a long story short, the result was that in getting her own rights recognized, she also allowed civil rights to be defined to include everyone, and freed everyone in her territory of their feudal obligations. Her death marks the beginning of the era of free communes throughout Italy north of Rome which also needed a legal system. Irnerius's students went on to become the lawyers and judges in the towns that her father had once controlled.

An amazing history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam written by a former Catholic Nun.  I learned so much from this book about why people I didn't understand behave the way they do !!

Contrary to popular belief, fundamentalism is not a throwback to some ancient form of religion but rather a response to the spiritual crisis of the modern world.

Armstrong focuses on three movements: Protestant fundamentalism in America, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel and Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt + Iran.

She provides a compelling and compassionate study of a radical form of religious expression that is critically shaping the course of world history.

Two Princes of Calabar by Randy J Sparks 2004
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SPATWO.html
Truly excellent, fascinating look at the 18th-century slave trade from an African perspective. Gives an in-depth picture of the slave trade from Africa to the colonies to Britain and back to Africa. Chronicles two brothers who go from being princely African slave traders, taken as slaves themselves, and despite numerous setbacks and overwhelming odds they manage to escape, secure their freedom in the British courts only to return to Africa and pick up where they left off as slave traders. Siblings who perservere through setback after setback. Theirs is a true version version of Lemony Snicket's unfortunate events.

Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara 2003
The movie is good, but the actual letters are awesome! Get to know Che as he becomes Che.

Both of these books are relatively short but thoroughly informative, frequently hillarious, and above all captivating. 

<div><br />&nbsp;&quot;To the Finland Station,&quot; - Edmund Wilson's thrillling study of the development of the revolutionary idea, from Paris to Petrograd.&nbsp; 65 years after publication it is still provocative.<br />And, although not exactly part of this list, the same author's &quot;Patriotic Gore.&quot; <br />Both books exemplify Wilson's vigorous style and confident critical judgment.&nbsp; </div><br />

Just read "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000" by Paul Kennedy. A study of how geography, demographics, and economics shaped modern conflicts and power balances. It was written in 85-86, and it's interesting to see how close Kennedy got with his predictions about what would happen in East Germany or how the USSR's contradictions would lead to trouble down the road.