Humanities
History
The record of what people did and why — organised by period and region, because that is how the evidence organises itself.
31 fields · 318 topics · 32 curated works
Fields within History
Prehistory & Human Origins
10Before writing, which is most of the story.
Palaeolithic Societies · Out of Africa Migrations · Neanderthals & Denisovans · Cave Art & Early Symbolism · The Neolithic Revolution
Mesopotamia & the Ancient Near East
10Where cities, writing and law first appear.
Sumer · Akkadian Empire · Babylonia · Assyria · The Hittites
Ancient Egypt
11Three thousand years of continuity, unusually well documented.
Predynastic Egypt · The Old Kingdom & Pyramids · The Middle Kingdom · The New Kingdom · Akhenaten & the Amarna Period
Ancient Greece
12The source of most Western political and philosophical vocabulary.
Minoan & Mycenaean Civilisation · The Greek Dark Ages · Archaic Greece · The Polis & City-States · Athenian Democracy
Ancient Rome
14The state that most later states tried to imitate.
The Roman Kingdom · The Roman Republic · The Punic Wars · Julius Caesar · Fall of the Republic
Ancient China
10The longest continuous political tradition on earth.
Shang Dynasty · Zhou Dynasty · Warring States Period · Qin Unification · Han Dynasty
Ancient India & South Asia
8Indus cities, Vedic culture and the great empires.
Indus Valley Civilisation · The Vedic Period · Mauryan Empire · Ashoka · Gupta Empire
Pre-Columbian Americas
9Complex societies that developed in complete isolation from Eurasia.
Olmec Civilisation · Maya Civilisation · Teotihuacan · The Aztec Empire · The Inca Empire
Medieval Europe
14A thousand years usually described in a caricature.
The Early Middle Ages · The Carolingian Empire · Feudalism · The Manorial System · The Viking Age
Byzantium & the Eastern Empire
8The half of Rome that lasted another millennium.
Foundation of Constantinople · Justinian I · Byzantine Administration · The Iconoclast Controversy · The Great Schism
The Islamic World
11From Arabia to Andalusia to Delhi.
Rise of Islam · The Rashidun Caliphate · Umayyad Caliphate · Abbasid Caliphate · The Islamic Golden Age
Africa Before Colonialism
10The parts of African history most curricula skip.
Kingdom of Kush · Aksum · Ghana Empire · Mali Empire & Mansa Musa · Songhai Empire
Renaissance & Reformation
10Europe reorganising its intellectual and religious life.
Italian Renaissance · Renaissance Humanism · The Medici · The Printing Revolution · Northern Renaissance
Exploration, Empire & the Atlantic World
10Global contact, and its violent asymmetries.
Age of Exploration · Portuguese & Spanish Empires · The Columbian Exchange · Conquest of the Americas · The Atlantic Slave Trade
The Enlightenment
7The eighteenth-century argument about reason and authority.
Enlightenment Thought · The Republic of Letters · The Encyclopédie · Enlightened Absolutism · Salons & Public Sphere
Age of Revolutions
10The period when the modern political order was forced into being.
The English Civil War · The Glorious Revolution · The American Revolution · The French Revolution · The Terror
Industrialisation & the Nineteenth Century
12The fastest change in material conditions in human history.
The Industrial Revolution · Factory System & Labour · Urbanisation in the 19th Century · Railways & Steam · Rise of the Working Class
The First World War
11The catastrophe that shaped everything after it.
Causes of the First World War · The Alliance System · Trench Warfare · The Western Front · The Eastern Front
The Interwar Years
8Twenty years of unresolved consequences.
The Weimar Republic · Rise of Fascism · Rise of Nazism · Stalin's Soviet Union · The Great Depression (Historical)
The Second World War
12The largest and deadliest conflict in history.
Outbreak & Blitzkrieg · The Battle of Britain · Operation Barbarossa · The Pacific War · The North African Campaign
The Holocaust & Genocide
11Studied because the mechanisms are not unique to one place or time.
Origins of Nazi Antisemitism · Ghettoisation · The Einsatzgruppen · The Camp System · Perpetrator Behaviour
The Cold War
12Forty-five years of confrontation without direct war between the principals.
Origins of the Cold War · Containment Policy · The Marshall Plan · The Berlin Blockade & Wall · The Korean War
Decolonisation & Independence
8The dismantling of empires and what replaced them.
Indian Independence & Partition · African Independence Movements · Algerian War · Indonesian Independence · The Non-Aligned Movement
Modern Middle East
10The region where imperial decisions have the longest half-life.
Fall of the Ottoman Empire · Sykes-Picot & Mandates · Formation of Modern States · Oil & Politics · Arab-Israeli Conflicts
Modern Asia
11The century in which the centre of gravity moved.
Chinese Republican Era · The Chinese Civil War · Mao & the People's Republic · The Great Leap Forward · The Cultural Revolution
Modern Africa & Latin America
9Post-independence trajectories, divergent and instructive.
Post-Colonial African Politics · African Economic Development · Conflict & State Failure · South Africa After Apartheid · Latin American Dictatorships
Contemporary History
9Since 1991 — recent enough to be contested.
Post-Cold War Order · Yugoslav Wars · Globalisation Era · September 11 & the War on Terror · The Rise of China
Military History
11Warfare as a subject in its own right.
Ancient Warfare · Medieval Warfare · Gunpowder Revolution · Naval Warfare · Strategy & Operational Art
Social & Everyday History
10How ordinary people actually lived.
History of Food · History of Work · History of Childhood · History of the Family · History of Medicine & Disease
Intellectual & Cultural History
8The history of ideas and how they travel.
History of Ideas · History of Science · History of Technology · History of Political Thought · History of Books & Reading
Historiography & Method
12How history is made, and why accounts differ.
Historical Method · Primary Source Analysis · Schools of Historiography · Annales School · Marxist Historiography
Reading in History
32Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
- BookIf This Is a ManPrimo Levi, 1947
Auschwitz recorded by a chemist determined to observe precisely, and the least consoling and most exact account of what it did to people.
- BookThe Guns of AugustBarbara Tuchman, 1962
Reconstructs the first month of 1914 to show how rigid plans and misread signals turned a crisis into a general war.
- Book1491Charles C. Mann, 2005
The Americas before Columbus were far more populous and more managed than taught, and most of that population died before it was seen.
- BookSPQRMary Beard, 2015
A history of Rome that keeps asking how we know, and is candid that much of the familiar story is later Roman self-mythology.
- BookThe Black DeathPhilip Ziegler, 1969
Traces the plague's passage through Europe and the social restructuring that followed the loss of a third of the population.
- BookA Short History of ByzantiumJohn Julius Norwich, 1997
Eleven centuries of the empire that outlived Rome by a millennium, and which Western history teaching still mostly skips.
- BookSapiensYuval Noah Harari, 2011
Argues shared fictions let large numbers of strangers cooperate — sweeping, readable, and disputed on many specifics.
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
- BookThe Wonder That Was IndiaA. L. Basham, 1954
A survey of Indian civilisation before the Muslim conquest that treats it as a subject in its own right rather than as a prelude.
- BookWhat Is History?E. H. Carr, 1961
Facts do not speak for themselves; the historian's selection is the argument, so study the historian before the history.
- BookThe Age of Revolution: 1789–1848Eric Hobsbawm, 1962
Treats the French and industrial revolutions as one dual transformation, which is what makes the nineteenth century legible.
- BookThe Face of BattleJohn Keegan, 1976
Rewrites military history from the position of the individual in the line at Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, rather than the general's map.
- BookThe Making of the Atomic BombRichard Rhodes, 1986
Traces the line from nuclear physics to Hiroshima, and stands as the best single account of science meeting the state.
- BookA Peace to End All PeaceDavid Fromkin, 1989
The modern Middle East was drawn by exhausted European powers in 1922, and most of its borders are still that settlement.
- BookAfrica: A Biography of the ContinentJohn Reader, 1997
Begins with geology and human origins rather than with European arrival, which reverses the usual shape of the story.
- BookThe Slave ShipMarcus Rediker, 2007
Puts the Atlantic trade back inside the vessel that carried it, where the economics and the violence cannot be separated.
- BookThe Rise and Fall of the Third ReichWilliam L. Shirer, 1960
A correspondent who was there reconstructs the Nazi state from its own captured documents, at a scale no later account has matched.
- BookOpen Veins of Latin AmericaEduardo Galeano, 1971
Reads five centuries as continuous extraction — polemical, enormously influential, and later disowned in part by Galeano himself.
- BookThe Rise and Fall of Ancient EgyptToby Wilkinson, 2010
Three thousand years as a political history rather than a parade of monuments, including the coercion the monuments required.
- BookTo Hell and Back: Europe 1914–1949Ian Kershaw, 2015
Treats the two wars and the years between as one continuous European catastrophe with a single set of unresolved causes.
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
- BookHistory of the Peloponnesian WarThucydides, 400 BCE
The first account of war written as analysis rather than myth, including the still-cited claim about fear driving conflict.
- BookRecords of the Grand HistorianSima Qian, 94 BCE
The founding work of Chinese historiography, written under disgrace, and the model for two millennia of dynastic history after it.
- BookThe MuqaddimahIbn Khaldun, 1377
Proposes that group solidarity rises and decays on a predictable cycle — arguably the first work of sociology, written four centuries early.
- BookThe Civilization of the Renaissance in ItalyJacob Burckhardt, 1860
Invented the Renaissance as a period and the idea of the self-fashioning individual — hugely influential and steadily qualified since.
- BookThe Great Chain of BeingArthur O. Lovejoy, 1936
Follows a single idea across two thousand years of philosophy and literature, and founds the history of ideas as a discipline.
- BookThe Wretched of the EarthFrantz Fanon, 1961
Colonialism is maintained by violence and its psychology outlasts the flag change — the central text of decolonisation, and a contested one.
- BookThe Making of the English Working ClassE. P. Thompson, 1963
A class is made by people, not produced by economics, and this rescues the losers of industrialisation from 'the condescension of posterity'.
- BookMontaillouEmmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 1975
Reconstructs an entire medieval village from inquisition records, and demonstrates that ordinary life leaves recoverable evidence.
- BookThe Search for Modern ChinaJonathan D. Spence, 1990
Four centuries of China told as a repeated attempt to build a state that can survive contact with the outside world.
- BookThe Age of ExtremesEric Hobsbawm, 1994
Frames a 'short twentieth century' from 1914 to 1991, written by a Marxist historian who lived through most of it and says so.
- BookAncient MesopotamiaA. Leo Oppenheim, 1964
Subtitled 'Portrait of a Dead Civilization', and unusually honest about how much of the first literate society we cannot recover.
- BookThe Enlightenment: An InterpretationPeter Gay, 1966
Reads the philosophes as a loose party united less by doctrine than by a programme of criticism directed at inherited authority.
- BookPostwar: A History of Europe Since 1945Tony Judt, 2005
A continent-wide account of how Europe rebuilt itself, treating east and west as one story rather than two.