sindikat [he/him]
Relatable. Wanted to be a novelist since I was 12. Now I’m 28 and I still haven’t written a single page of fiction in my entire life.
Why does Portland flag look like a swastika?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Arrighi:
world-systems analyst
Although in many ways intellectually close to Immanuel Wallerstein, Arrighi tends to ascribe greater significance to the recent shift in economic power to East Asia. He also emphasized his debt to Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi and Joseph Schumpeter.
Ehi, cazzo, this is exactly the shit I wanna dive into next year, once I’m done with baby history. World-system theory is super fascinating, thanks a lot, mate! :)
Awesome! Would you be interested in a Discord server or something like that?
From my experience, I madly enjoy The Great Courses. They are available on Audible, but if you don’t wanna support Bezos, you can find torrents by entering «the great courses torrent site:reddit.com» on Google. They are audio university lectures on all kinds of subjects, including history, and there are hundreds of them. They are done by legit university professors, so that’s a plus. I never thought of myself as an audiobook guy, but I walk a lot (commuting to work), and I also listen to audiobooks every time I’m cooking, cleaning etc.
The ones that I particularly enjoyed were A Brief History of the World by Peter N. Stearns and History Of The Ancient World: A Global Perspective by Gregory S. Aldrete. The former is especially interesting. It’s great, because it introduces sorta systemic thinking about history, instead of reciting facts about a particular empire in isolation, it investigates connections between things, like how Mongolian conquests influenced the spread of Bubonic Plague, or how the Fall of Constantinople led to Columbus sailing west etc. It’s also problematic, because the thing about non-socialist academic historians is that they are incredibly transgressive when they write about long time ago history, but the closer they get to the 20–21 centuries, the more toothlessly liberal they become. I remember being really disappointed in the last few lectures of that course after so many incredibly strong chapters, because the ones about 20 and 21 centuries were like «so globalization is a thing, you know… isn’t that peculiar? and what’s up with the Internet changing things so radically? hmm»
The one that I really enjoyed despite its serious flaws is World History: The Fertile Crescent to the American Revolution by Linwood Thompson. It’s geared towards high-schoolers (so at the level “I literally know nothing about history”), which already means that it grossly oversimplifies things and introduces pernicious narratives that are often weaponized by dilettante right-wingers, especially of the pimple-faced gamer variety. Nevertheless, I have a soft spot for it, because the guy does hilarious theatrical presentations of each lecture, like in one on Russian history he does an atrocious Russian accent roleplaying Princess Olga, and humor, however terrible, greatly helps learning.
For reading, instead of listening, I think /r/AskHistorians general reading list is the best start. I haven’t read any of them, but /r/AskHistorians is considered extremely high quality history subreddit, and they pretty much unanimously vouch for especially A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich. Apparently it’s a children’s book, but incredibly well-written, so adults can enjoy it too.
For YouTube stuff I personally like Kings & Generals. Despite a corny name, they are BreadTube-adjacent & very high production quality. They do contain inaccuracies from time to time, though.
If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know, but I’m not a historian and I barely know any of this stuff myself (hence me making this post to begin with).
Of course, there’s always Crash Course World History by John Green on YouTube, KhanAcademy World History, but they are so basic to the point that I’d rather recommend skipping them and diving into slightly more academic material regardless of prerequisite background. Surprisingly, university lectures & serious books are actually way more enjoyable once you get over the initial psychological barrier.
Do you think it’s realistic to have some kind of wiki or group document, where different participants contribute their own reviews/summaries/effortposts of what they’ve read or know?
The motivation of making a book club instead of just keeping plowing through books on my own is that I have this philosophy of learning, informed by my experience with spaced repetition and Anki, book Make It Stick, Peak by Anders Ericsson, Marty Lobdell’s Study Less, Study Smart video, Stephen Chew from Samford University, and some others.
The philosophy is that reading a book from cover to cover just doesn’t work. You don’t remember anything, and even if you do, it lies deadweight in your brain, it’s just pointless junk. You need to engage with the material, do a “dialectical” process if you will. This engagement can take many forms, recitation using Spaced Repetition Software, taking copious notes, connecting it somehow to already existing knowledge, and whatnot. And one such form of engagement is telling stuff that you’ve learned to other people. Maybe you just retell it in your own words, making sure you yourself understand what the hell you’re talking about. Maybe the other person knows this stuff too, so you can ask them questions, argue with them, etc. But in any case, once you bounce what you’ve learned against other people, it stops being deadweight and becomes “integrated” kinda.
So I’m thinking, if people read a book, then write a summary in their own words (and the summary can include subjective and emotional perspectives as well), and other people read it and critique it, it could be an interesting exercise. Whatcha think?