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Grainger finds a way to focus in on some of the details of the early Hellenistic period by concentrating on the shortest-lived dynasty of the Successors, while arguing for its pivotal position in the period. I think he stretches the point a bit at the end, but in general, it’s convincing.

The bulk of the book is about Antipater himself, and examines what can be known of him from the sources. The first part starts with his early life (which is pretty much all speculation, if reasonable), and carries through to the death of Alexander. Antipater was presumably of one of the prominent families of Macedon (a subject that the sources just don’t go into at all), and saw first-hand the chaos around civil wars and unstable dynastic struggles from before Philip II.

Grainger assumes this is behind a lot of Antipater’s later actions as he first administers Macedon for Philip while he’s on campaign, and then when Alexander is on campaign, and then acts as effective regent for Philip III and Alexander IV. He’s shown as interested in stability and continuity, and doesn’t show any real signs taking power in his own name during the early wars of the Successors. Its one of those things that’s hard to know, but it is reasonable.

There is of course, also a good history of the Lamian War in here, as the apparent maneuvers are looked at in some detail. Other conflicts (notably with Epirus and the northern frontier) are covered less well, mostly because of the lack of sources, which still leads to a fair amount of supposition with any of these. I could really have used a detail map of Macedonia and the directly adjacent regions.

The second section deals with Kassander, showing him moving into position as regent and King of Macendon after his father’s death, and his attempts at state-building. The big surprise here was his foundation (and re-foundation) of a few cities, only one of which really took off, named after his wife, Thessalonike. The last three chapters go into the remnants of the family after his death and the end of the dynasty with the Antigonids taking over Macedonia. This part really suffers from being about people not at the center of power, and therefore not mentioned as much in the sources, but Grainger pulls out a few facts, and certainly shows Antipater’s daughters as having some real influence.

Grainger states up front that part of the idea for the book was to be able to focus his attention down, and it works. This is a nicely detailed history from just pre-Alexander through much of the diodochoi era, and brought a lot of things into focus. It suffers a little from going into things that there’s not a lot of sources for, but that is often the curse of ancient history.

Alan Taylor admits straight-up in the introduction that he took a very expansive view of the subject of the first volume of Penguin’s History of the United States series. Geographically, he looks at all of North America, rather than just the broad swath that would become part of the US. Time-wise… well, he does start with the initial migrations across the Bering Strait, but naturally doesn’t spend that much time with the spread of humanity across the continent and the changes that wrought. But he does talk about the subject before moving on to the arrival of Europeans from across the Atlantic.

In general, this is the usual ‘colonial’ focus, with the book winding down once the United States forms (though the last section covers the California coast and Hawaii up to about 1800). The main point of the increased geographical scope is to show the various European projects of conquest and/or settlement, and how they played out differently, or against each other. Regions are looked at in large blocks in the text, which partially undercuts the point, as some relationships end up scattered about, but mostly it works.

Part of why it works is that North America wasn’t any sort of unified place from native or European viewpoints in the period, so several stories play out more-or-less independently. They also provide meaningful compare and contrast examples, especially for the Eastern Seaboard colonies. Those sections are split up by the original English administering of them, and explains how the modern states were originally grouped before being split into separate colonies later (a sequence never adequately mentioned, much less explained, in other histories I’ve seen).

The general thesis through most of the book is how European powers tried to control this new continent, but the ability to have things go the way planned always fell far short of the plans. Past this, there is a good amount of explanation of how native agriculture worked in various regions, and how European settlers inevitably disrupted these patterns, starting the cycle of friction that was only downward as exposure to European diseases rapidly diminished native populations.

Taylor is also at great pains to point out that this was nearly as much a problem for early Spanish authorities, since the main plan was to make use of the huge pool of labor they had conquered… and was now dying off. This leads to needing to import labor, and Taylor goes into the economic process where slave labor crowds out indentured labor (which was more than bad enough). Much of the latter half looks at how various regions evolved slightly differently under these pressures.

There’s a fair number of conflicts during this period, and I don’t think they’re well served here. Conflicts between Europeans and natives, like Metacomet’s War, are well-enough handled, but any conflict between European powers feels more glossed over, even within the limitations of such an overview, with some exception for the British conquest of the Dutch colonies.

This is, of course, and overview, and has to be fairly succinct in any subject, but this is definitely a new standard in overviews of the period, and an excellent start to Penguin’s series.

This is part one of a massive four-volume history of the Hundred Years War. As such, it spends a good amount of time setting the stage, and covers through Crecy and the siege of Callais.

The first chapter is an interesting, and effective, experiment in writing, presenting the funeral of Charles IV in 1328, and using it to show the physical side of Paris as the procession walks from Notre-Dame to Saint-Denis, which was well outside Paris at the time, and taking asides to talk about the state of France as a whole.

The rest of the book… isn’t quite like that, though it continues to do the same great job at presenting the smaller stories to build up the larger ones. Much of the book is taken up with pre-war maneuvering, and starts with an interesting point that while Philip IV (the Valois successor to the Capetian Charles IV) saw his relationship with Edward III (and his French holdings in Gascony) in feudal terms, the French bureaucracy generally saw things in more ‘nationalistic’ terms. Much of the early part of the book revolves around problems arising from judicial proceedings where English authority is largely undermined and eroded away.

This creates a situation where war is increasingly likely, as the ‘high court’ for affairs in Gascony is in Paris, and just by its nature generally stacks the deck against Edward III, who is still the legal lord of the area, and his vassals. There’s lots of litigation held up for years, occasional seizures of castles as part of legal decisions, and lots of low-level politics of local factions aligned with the English or the French.

Of course, France is a large, populous country, compared with relatively small and backward England. Much of the book is also spent looking at the various limits on the power of the French court, and how that made it difficult to pursue a vigorous campaign when fighting breaks out. England is comparatively centralized, and Edward III was willing to go to some fairly extreme measures to finance a war. Much of the middle of the book has all sorts of financial woes as even experimental high-finance can’t keep up with the needs of paying and feeding a major army for long.

But much of that serves as practice for more successful English campaigns once some of the difficulties are sorted out. Philip IV still hasn’t really sorted out his troubles, enhancing a sense of paralysis as the English army finally gets its act together, and marches across a fair amount of northern France, and then has the first of several spectacular, but not war-winning, victories at Crecy.

Along the way, the book spends time with problems in Wales, and much more notably, Scotland, making sure that there is as complete a view of the situation, and the pressures on England and France, as possible. Overall, it’s very thorough, and an interesting read from start to finish. Sadly, it’ll probably take me far longer than it should to get to the next three volumes.

I picked this up when there was a Kindle sale on Thomas Costain books a bit ago. I hadn’t been aware of him writing a series on Canada, and it turns out the reason is he didn’t. This is the first book in a six-book series, but each volume was written by a different author. More surprising, this wasn’t an arrangement that the publisher put together, like with the Oxford History of Europe, but one the authors themselves put together, being Canadians who felt a need for such a history series.

In general, this is up to Costain’s usual quality (I certainly recommend his history of the Plantagenets) of writing and creating a digestible narrative history. However, this is originally a 1954 book, and shows a few problems. First, this pretty much all from the colonial settler’s point of view. Given the time and knowledge available to him this isn’t too bad, and he takes time at one point to fairly graphically show that the colonists were capable of atrocities every bit as bad as anything the Native Americans did. However, there’s a fair amount of stereotyping here, and, much worse, on two occasions he has recourse to phrenology.

Outside of those concerns, there’s other things I consider weaknesses, mostly because I’d like some details outside his narrative. Costain starts with some of the initial exploration of the North American coast by Cabot et al, and by the time settlement of the area begins there’s already fishing off the Grand Banks going on, but he doesn’t mention how that got going (or by whom).

This just on the early French regime in Canada, and covers up to about 1690, which is certainly not something I have any real knowledge of. So, it was still reasonably informative, though I never got as cohesive an impression as would have like (extremely sketchy geographical knowledge of the area on my end does not help). Overall, I only give it a limited recommendation, and a more current book on the subject would probably be preferred.

Purkiss’ history of the ECW was something of a slog for me to get through. The general idea as given is admirable: to look at the English Civil War as something that involved people, and see how various people were impacted by it.

In general, the technique for this is good. She’s gone through a lot of primary sources, and found ones with fairly consistent records for an extended period of time, and used them to generate narratives at the personal level, with lots of extensive quotes. There’s a lot of contextualization around this, and it pays off.

However, outside of that, the results aren’t nearly as good. I suspected that Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause rested too much on ‘everybody knows’ facts about the American Revolution, and I’m sure that Purkiss has done this here. She’s English and writing for an English audience, so I can’t say how on-target she is on her assumptions, but I found her brushing by statements as if they were self-evident, and they were not for me. The trained bands of the early fighting are mentioned but not described. I know generally what they are because I’ve read Haythornwaite’s book on the ECW, which goes into them. Here, they’re a blank spot.

And that’s a symptom of the larger issues of the book. It’s roughly chronological in format, but has extended breaks to talk about particular social issues at length, which breaks up the chronology enough to make it difficult to keep track off. Some of the major battles get very good treatment, using descriptions from participants to at least show how the action felt for some of the non-commanders (actually quite valuable). Certain areas get similarly good treatment, as one of her sources has a bunch of letters showing what was happening around a manor in hostile country. But there’s not a lot of consistency or solid presentation here.

At best, this is a good second or third book to read about the ECW. Find a good regular general history first, then turn to this to start filling in some of what was going on away from the most dramatic parts.