The Ottoman Empire lasted a shade over six centuries, and Lord Kinross covers its history in a bit over 600 pages. 600 quite good pages, with a fair number of full-page images (mostly period portraits or landscapes) and a small[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posts Tagged history
Being something of a fan of warring states Japan (you can largely thank Nobunaga’s Ambition II for that), I’ve been aware for some time that at the end of the era, there was a Japanese invasion of Korea. But not[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Everyone knows of the Age of Exploration, and the Portuguese efforts to find a sea-route around Africa to India. If you know a little more history, you know something of their efforts related to controlling trade in India and the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is the second book I’ve read recently about the Thirty Years War, both of which have the same informative, if unimaginative, title of The Thirty Years War. Cicely Veronica Wedgwood’s history is considered a classic English-language history of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Sir Jens’ (‘Sir’ seems to be his first name…) In the Shadow of Empires is an amateur history book about Vlad Dracula (as opposed to a sensational book about the fictional ‘Dracula’). It shows its amateur status in some uneven[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Published by Didactic Press, Gardiner’s The Thirty Years War is another cheap ebook of a public-domain work. The normal price seems to be a buck or two, and I think I picked it up for free. In general, this is[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve generally been liking Osprey’s turn towards specialized subjects in their Elite line, and this is no exception. The book takes a look at what is known of Roman sieges from the fall of Carthage to the siege of Cremna[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Prussia weighed heavily on the collective mind of Europe during the 19th and 20th Centuries. My history classes generally blamed the formation of Germany for throwing off the structure of international power in Europe and causing two World Wars. And[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The fundamental problem with most of ancient history is that the vast bulk of everyone involved left no records behind. There are bright spots, and sometimes stories that were later written down, but sometimes even those iffy sources are missing.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve long been interested in the ancient world. The Roman Empire, especially, gets a lot of my historical interest. In my reading, it’s very easy to find books on Rome (Empire and Republic), and on Alexander. The period right after[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…