Best england history books according to redditors

It's a book.

> All the Countries We've Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To

(emphasis mine)

Bigger image

Historian John Keegan wrote about exactly that- dying soldiers and horses tend to try to climb on top of each other, for support, for mutual defense, or just for comfort in their last moments. Before you know it, you've got a pile, which subsequent waves of attackers and defenders have to try to climb before they can get to their opponents. Then they start dying on top of the piles, making them higher (an armored corpse is an unstable fighting platform and increases your chance of dying, he points out). If you have two or three piles of bodies close by, the gap tends to get filled in by more bodies. And before you know it, wall of bodies, which can trap one of the armies by creating a kill zone they can't get out of.

Ramsey knew this. That was the point of the burning flayed men on saltires. It was to show range to the bowmen. Ramsey let Rickon run towards the Stark army, but waited until Jon was in position to kill him. He knew when Jon was in position because he knew exactly how far away the flayed men were. The fires also helped show wind direction. I'm sure Ramsey had another plan if Jon had refused to take the bait, but… like Sansa said, Ramsey is pretty good at getting into your head and pushing all the buttons in the way that will hurt you the most. Well, was.

Read Keegan's analysis of the battle of Agincourt to get a better feel for the Battle of the Bastards: https://www.amazon.com/Face-Battle-Study-Agincourt-Waterloo/dp/0140048979

These holidays or "holy days" were not often not really vacations but days that you would attend church and have a large meal. These days often were centered around a Saint or the life of Jesus and were pretty frequent. Church, above all, was a social gathering. People were very pious, but they also enjoyed gossip. These days were an important way of uniting scattered farms in the days before reliable mail systems.

On most of these days you would still do many chores and you may have also worked. From what I gather they were somewhat like a modern "half day".

Source: The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England

Peasant was a very specific role played in a medieval village, though they were not always referred to by that title (title's the wrong word, since peasants weren't really given "titles", but you know what I'm saying.) In short, they were among the lowest classes of the very structured medieval fief system. Not all peasants were considered equal - some were more prestigious than others, either based on family history or their land's yield. Essentially, a peasant was a farmer, but it's more complicated than that. They did not own their own land (usually) and farmland was considered "communal" in that nobody "owned" it (the Lord really did) and everybody worked to keep the system going (for a while, for more information on why this system ended, see the Peasant Wars period in Britain and W. Europe). They were just above cotters, who subsisted in small cottages and lived on whatever they could grow in a tiny garden (this land was either undesirable to a liege lord, or gifted out of pity, or due to a family debt, or something similar). Peasants were workers, and were given land with the understanding that they could take enough food to survive, and pay the rest in tax. In exchange, they were offered protection from invasion and rival Lords, by their liege lord and his army.

We don't refer to people as peasants anymore because our economic system doesn't include this class of people. In modern capitalism, land can be bought and sold by any class of people, and land ownership is common. At least, in theory - I'm sure you could make the argument that banks have become the liege lord, because they hold the deed to your land while you pay your mortgage. In a sense, the middle class in America fulfills the role of peasants, because they pay out most of their wage in the form of bills, taxes, and loans. But, they standard of living for the middle and lower class in America is exponentially better than that of a medieval peasant.

For a good overview of the role of Peasants, Cotters, and liege Lords, read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Medieval-Village-Frances-Gies/dp/0060920467

Funny I'm reading Decline and Fall of the British Empire [Rise and Fall of the British Empire] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-British-Empire/dp/031216985X) right now and finished the chapter on WWI not 20 minutes ago. Weird.

On phone so will paraphrase: the British Empire at least had more than enough manpower available. The question was whether to train non-Indian native populations in the craft of modern war. Whites were highly valued as soldiers and did not like fighting next to coloreds of any sort. There was also a big concern about the dangers of teaching Africans and some Asians the craft of modern European war, lest a corps of professionally trained nationalist soldiers be used against white settlers post-bellum.

So while yes, the White ranks were running thin - particularly in the French Army, indigenous soldiers from the reaches of Empire were still mostly held back as porters and quartermasters. There was one story about how the Maori from New Zealand, magnificent fighters, were frustrated at being held on garrison duty in Malta.

So logically, one would expect that if the shortage of white troops grew too severe, native soldiers would fill the combat roles well before the consideration of women.

typed on my iPhone, forgive any typos

That sounds awesome! I'm currently building a world for a book. And something like this seems super helpful. Do you think it's the same as this one, even though the cover isn't quite the same? https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

A lot of people here are giving shitty answers and not helping because they disprove of your use of "dark ages."
On behalf on the internet I apologize. They are giving you crap for not knowing something you have expressed interest in learning about.
I am fascinated by the "Dark ages" and I have a history degree and I'm still using the term. I understand it to usually mean "the medieval times" or "the huge time-span that is not usually taught to the average student." Most history in public schools (at least that I've seen) tends to gloss over the time from the Romans to the early renaissance so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that's the era you want. It's my favorite era to study for that reason - most people know so little about this 1000 year span in history.
A good starter book for you would be A world lit only by Fire I loved this book. It's not overly scholarly and is a good read.
Another great one is Mysteries of the Middle Ages... Thomas Cahill is a great writer and if this version of the paperback is anything like my copy it is a visually stunning read. I discovered him through "How the Irish Saved Civilization" which was also great.
Mark Kurlansky's books (Salt and Cod specifically come to mind) are well written, specific histories that cover parts of this time period.
I wish my books weren't still packed (recently moved) because I want to dig through the stack and share them all. :) I suck at remembering names of stuff. I recommend browsing the amazon pages section of "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" for other good recommendations.
Happy Reading!! :)
edit - just remembered this one on the byzantine empire of all the books I've read on the Byzantines, that one is my favorite.

edit I'm getting a lashing for "A World Lit Only By Fire" due to the fact that it contains historical inaccuracies.
Please read this one instead In the year 1000.
I'm not trying to recommend dry scholarly tomes, I am trying to think of books that are fun, interesting, and entertaining to read while still being informative.

There is a fascinating book called The Most Powerful Idea in the World that I would recommend to anyone interested in this sort of thing. It makes the claim that the steam engine is the most important invention since irrigation, half because of what it allowed us to do, and half because of how our mindset changed while developing it.

You should give this a good once over.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

Hi! This sounds super interesting! Which game are you modding, sounds like something like Total War? I used to love that back in the day, I would definitely play a mod with some more realistic Scottish historical context!

You're right that this is a difficult area to research - the thing about this era is that the sources for Scotland are very sketchy - very few written records from this period survive, and a lot of it is translated through later witnesses. A lot of it is also apocryphal and not all of it ends up in the history books (though I added some links at the bottom to some good books if that's useful!).

That being said, there are definitely some colourful events that you could draw on in this period, one of huge upheaval and change in Scotland. And using a bit of license is totally OK - as long as you don't just make things up! - some of the best films about Medieval Scotland, like Braveheart, aren't 100% accurate.

So here are a couple of events off the top of my head you might be able to use, adapt, refer to etc. Hopefully other people in the sub can add details if I've forgotten any or got something incorrect!

​

1. The Fànne v. Dòbber Wars
   
   The Fànne - Dòbber Wars was a period of major conflict and violence between two tribes (the clans came a bit later) in Scottish history that marked an important early phase in the rise of Kenneth MacAlpin, sometimes seen as the first King of Scots. He was also a member of the Fànne tribe, and in fact is thought to have become Chief of the Fànnes while still quite young due to his military skill. At some point however, before Kenneth was born, the Fànne tribe split due to a dispute over heritage (very important in those days!), which saw one faction claiming rightful heritage of the lineage - known as the Pure Fànnes - whereas a second faction claimed feudal overlordship over all of the tribe. They have come to be known by historians as the Total Fànnes because of the breadth of their claim. Eventually the Pure Fànnes were successful in driving out their rivals, and so the Total Fànnes left the tribe and founded a new one, the Dòbbers (from the old Pictish words Dòb and Ur - 'glorious' and 'exile'). Because they never gave up their claims to their kinship, they came to be called the 'kin Dòbbers'.
   
   If we jump back to Kenneth MacAlpin, by the time he assumed leadership of the tribe these two tribes were basically at war. The 830s saw repeated, bloodthirsty clashes between the Pure Fànnes and the Kin Dòbbers without any resolution, until finally both sides, exhausted, decided to make peace. This was done at the foot of a mountain called Cúl Beag in the northwest Highlands, near modern-day Ullapool. You might have heard of a medieval tradition called the Kiss of Peace. Well Scotland had its own version of that, which was used at this occasion, called the 'Té' in Gaelic, so bearing in mind the location, the peace treaty between the Pure Fànnes and the Kin Dòbbers was known as the Tè Beag.
   
   Because the sources are very unclear we don't know exactly what this looked like, but it involved King Kenneth and the Chief of the Dòbbers, Avon Four Sail (a moniker which evidently refers to his maritime skills and mercantile wealth). The Té Beag is described in much later sources as 'an intimate gesture' (so perhaps not unlike the Kiss of Peace) that was 'performed in a squatting position close to the fundament'. It was followed by both sides breaking open several ritual casks of whisky (booze features in a lot of this history!) known as B'aw, from the Gaelic 'special' and 'drink'. Although we don't know exactly when this event took place, it's still said that 'B'aws were tasted that day'.
   
   ​
   
   
2. The Pumping of the Maws
   
   This isn't really a historical event per se, more of a kind of cultural anecdote that you might be able to use - hope it's still useful!
   
   So I'm sure you've heard the word 'maw' before, which usually refers to something like an opening, e.g. the mouth of a cave, but in Scotland it has several meanings. One of these is a kind of container or skin with a narrow opening (so a bit like the other definitions). It was mainly used to store alcohol - especially whisky, back in the day (told you there was a lot of booze! We Scots sure love to drink!). To give you an idea, the modern bagpipe is also built using a maw, so you can see the kind of dimensions I mean.
   
   Now you'll know already that although whisky has been made in Scotland for hundreds of years, it wasn't always done legally. Back in Medieval Scotland, the Crown used to try and tax whisky production in every household, so a lot of people used to make it secretly using their own equipment rather than a big, central still. And it was stored in maws - because they're flexible, they were easier to hide away than a big barrel or cask. This is a much later source, but it gives you an idea: illicit distilling.
   
   OK so in Medieval Scotland, a lot of villages were very remote, so the Royal Tax Collector used to visit only once a year - and as soon as he was gone, they knew they were in the clear for another 12 months! This led to a custom where everyone in the village would gather after the Royal Tax Collector had gone, put the whisky into casks (important for the maturing process) and clean out the maws with rudimentary pumping devices, ready for next time. This was a collective activity and became known as The Pumping of the Maws - basically, everyone in the village would bring their maw to the common grazing lands, see that each maw was properly pumped, and there would be inspections to make sure it was done correctly. Often clansmen would pump each others' maws for a measure of accountability, but it was common enough to pump one's own maw, too. Really skilful clansmen could actually pump numerous maws in one session - in some villages the one who got through the most would be ritually crowned the 'Méad Shaggháir' (from the Gaelic words Méad and Sheág, meaning 'enthusiastic' and 'efficient'). After all this, there would be a giant party where some of the whisky from the previous year would be cracked open and drunk while the freshly-pumped maws would dry out in the sun - great stuff!
   
   ***
   
   ​
   
   Sorry if that's a bit much detail, I can get a bit carried away with my enthusiasm for history sometimes! I hope it's useful anyway and that you might be able to use one or two details, even if the whole stories don't make it in.
   
   ​
   
   Finally some literature that you might find useful if you want to do some more research!
   
   Scotland: A New History by Michael Lynch - quite an old book now but it holds up well
   
   Scotland: The Story of a Nation by Magnus Magnusson
   
   ​
   
   I'd love to see some of these details make it into the mod - keep us posted!

Agreed. Lots of the WWII books from the 80's and 90's very much bought into the superior Wehrmacht narrative. Michael Reynolds "Steel Inferno: 1st SS Panzer Corps in Normandy" was one of the first "serious" books I read about Normandy and it really hit home on the "inferior" nature of Allied tanks, the superiority of training and leadership of the SS soldiers, and that the Allies prevailed through numbers. It wasn't Wehrby in the sense that the author had a hard-on for the SS, but it was part of the school of thought that developed from the 80's revisionist works like Carlo D'Este book "Decision in Normandy", which made the notion the Allies won purely through superior material and manpower central to its thesis.

My fourth year university seminar paper was on the historiography of Anglo-Canadian armor in the Battle of Normandy, and you can see how many of the Wehraboo idea's came out of the literature of the late 70's and early 80s, though they existed in more "military" circles prior to that (NATO really got off in the 50's and 60's on getting the former German commanders to give them tours so they could "learn their secrets" on how to defeat enemies with superior manpower and resources - apparently forgot these guys lost).

It wasn't until the 2000's you started to get books like John Buckley's "British Armour in the Normandy Campaign 1944" or Stephen Hart's "Montgomery and Colossal Cracks: The 21st Army Group in Northwest Europe, 1944-45" or Terry Copps "Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy" the reevaluated the Anglo-Canadian performance in Normandy against the Wehrmacht and SS in a better light. I'm less familiar with the historiography of the US army in WWII.

But the stuff that Wehraboo's spout was pretty mainstream only 2-3 decades ago. That is why the History Channel stuff is so bad, since the HC stopped doing serious documentaries in the early 2000's for the most part, so what HC documentaries remains on youtube tends to reflect where the school of thought was at that time. For all intents and purposes, the stuff on this subreddit is an outgrowth of the recent round of revisionism that occured in WWII history, which is revisionism against the previous round that occured around the 80's, which itself was revisionism from the post-war works (and there are different kinds of revisionism as well, for example post war works tended to be very strategic looking where as the revisionism of the 80's brought in a lot of the ground level stuff from interviews with veterans - John Kegans work "The face of battle" was really important in starting the trend of getting the experiences of soldiers recorded in WWII history books)

If anyone is interested in the links between the UK and Saudi Arabia, a fantastic book is Mark Curtis' "Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam"

It deals with the way the British government has consistently funded and trained radical Islamic movements in order to use them as a counterweight to secular, progressive movements in order to maintain control of oil.

You might be interested in checking out How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Very good writer there if you like reading history.

Try The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth century. It's a good book, got good reviews and isn't to in-depth so remains a fun light read.


https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1845950992/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_K6vWBbDP2QMX7

Start with The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey. It's a great read and it will introduce you to a lot of concepts of the early middle ages in a fun and very informative way.

Then I'd move on to books by Joeseph and Frances Gies, particularly Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, and Life in a Medieval Village (the last one being my personal favorite, although village life is especially interesting to me). You really can't go wrong with any Gies books though, so if one catches your eye, go for it.

Then, when you're ready to go into further depth, move onto the books of G. G. Coulton. They were mostly written in the early 20th century so they can be a little dry, but holy smokes the guy was an erudite medievalist, and many authors and researchers owe a lot to him.

BONUS: If, like me, you become interested in the village life aspect of the middle ages, there are some primary documents that you can find online too. I recommend at least The Rules of Robert Grosseteste, Seneschaucie, and Robert of Henley's Husbandry (I don't know what that site is, it was just the first one that came up on my search results).

Meh, over in the Americas, that was the term that we gave to Scottish immigrants at the time, and it stuck. You should note in that contemporary language in the UK at the time, Scotch was a perfectly acceptable adjective to apply to either the drink or the person. Also, at that time Scotch itself was not a popular drink amongst non-scottish folks.

If you're interested in Scottish history, I would recommend Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World:
http://www.amazon.ca/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

Medieval Cities had specialized shops for almost everything. A city with actual walls would have freemen who were chandlers, butchers, leatherworkers, smiths, etc. with their own shops, typically with their family living in the second story of the building.

Market towns (pop a few hundred) are much more likely to have the everything is sold at the market vibe. But usually only twice a week or something. You probably would be entirely unable to find serious armor there.

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368722301&sr=8-1&keywords=time+travelers+guide+to+medieval+england

this book gives you a great background to extrapolate from real history to get a realistic fantasy setting

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

It wasn't all that dissimilar from many marriages today. Two people gathered together with their friends and families, which often constituted their entire village. They gathered at the medieval community center most often, which was usually the local church or chapel. The purpose of meeting here was not only to receive the blessing of God on their marriage, but also to announce their marriage in a public setting with reputable witnesses, of which any official member of the clergy was included. These witnesses legitimized the marriage in the eyes of God and the people, especially important before government records were regularly kept and customs were still largely oral.

Well known modern scholars on the subject are Frances and Joseph Gies, Life in a Medieval Village, here, or Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, here. Barbara Hanawalt has one of the most respected books on medieval peasantry in the last generation called The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, here.

Finally, a duller look of medieval marriage according to canon law can be found in Gratian's Decretum here.

I hope this helps a little. Happy Reading!

I loved Witcher 3. You might be interested in this: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Read, read, and read some more.

A decent popularly-accessible book on life in the later "dark ages" would be The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey. He addresses everything from daily life, to the agricultural cycle, to health and medicine all in a short and easy read.

Now that's for England in the late 10th century. The fads, superstitions, and culture would be different in, say, southern France or Silesia.


As for a little theory-crafting:
Your house would be a single room, made of a timber frame and walled with wattle-and-daub. The thatch making up the roof would be replaced every couple years or so (a more efficient way of doing this wouldn't be invented until the 14th century), and the floor of bare earth covered with a thick layer of rushes that were swept out and replaced periodically.

You wake up at dawn lying on the floor. You have no bed to speak of, but the rushes are comparably soft and warm, and your woolen blanket soft and comfortable. You complain to your wife that it might be time to change the fleabane hanging from the walls, as you think a couple might have gotten in to your blankets. She rolls her eyes at your grousing and prods at the small fire in the center of the single room. The smoke rises to the rafters and slowly leaks out through a vent on one side.

Your children rise groggily and rub their eyes as you wash your face, arms, hands, and chest with water from a pottery basin and ewer. You change your linen undershirt and briaes (sort of like loose boxer shorts) and pull on your long, woolen tunic. You've had it for a long time, and the once more vibrant orange-red color, dyed with madder, has begun to fade.

You instruct your middle child to empty the chamber pots while you head outside to relieve yourself. After you finish, you give your younger children their final reprimands to do their chores, feel the forehead of your youngest and fret she's feeling feverish, fetch your single ox, kiss your wife, and head for the fields. Your eldest son accompanies you. Though he is still young, he will be assigned to keep the birds away from the freshly-planted seed with stones and sticks.

It's early spring, and that means plowing. You meet with the other men of the manner and work together to plow your fields. you have been assigned a couple narrow strips in a couple different fields, as has everyone else. Whatever you can grow in these furrows is yours. In addition to your own land, you and your neighbors also work the land of your lord. It's a two-way relationship--you work his land and he lays on feasts and provides certain resources. If times are hard, he's required to feed you. Last year, the harvest was bad and several freemen from the surrounding came to your lord and voluntarily submitted themselves to him in exchange for food. They now number amongst your neighbors.

You work all morning with the other men plowing long, narrow furrows into the earth and scattering seeds for the yearly crop of wheat or barley. You break at midday for your first meal of the day, a thick pottage of long-boiled vegetables thickened with barley and edible greens. You drink a weak ale or water (you're away from the cities--the water is as clean as it gets).

You work all afternoon, chatting and gossiping with the others. Your wife is at home grinding wheat and barley, tending the fire, cooking your meal, spinning wool into yarn, gathering vegetables from the fields surrounding, and wash the family's linen undergarments. Your children help to their abilities, take care of the animals, fetch water, and play.

In the evening, your chat, play, sing, eat, drink, and pray. When night falls, you strip off your woolen outer layers, maybe change to fresh linens, and curl up in your blankets next to your wife on the floor. Tomorrow is a Sunday, and that means church. The next day is a feast day, and that also means church, as well as some merryment with your neighbors.

You grow different crops at different times of year. You have all sorts of superstitions about how to get the best crop yields, how to stay healthy, how to avoid trouble--some work; some don't. Religion is not really something you even think about--it's just a part of daily life. You've never in your entire life met anyone with beliefs other than that of "christian," though you've heard tell of lands beyond.

If you get sick, there are prayers and home remedies a plenty. You're too poor to afford one of the school-trained doctors, of which there are a few, who study the old Greek and Roman arts of medicine.

If you're badly injured, there are amputations, trepanning, and setting of broken bones.

If we're in England, in times of trouble, you would not be called up to fight in the Fyrd (closest modern term would be "militia"). That was for the freemen. If you were a freeman, you would be required to own a shield and spear and to turn up with both plus personal provisions when your lord orders, or pay a hefty fine.

If you are wronged, justice was local, with the community taking care of most of the judgement and the lord acting as arbiter if necessary. The Saxon-era English had a rather ingenious system of fines for various offences, including set rates for loss or damage of body parts (teeth included).

For the medieval period, I found The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England very interesting. Definitely more of a popular book than hard-core history, though.

I suggest reading The Face of Battle by John Keegan for more information on Agincourt. Keegan says that arrows did far less damage to the heavily-armored French men-at-arms (mostly dismounted) than popularly believed and instead acted as an irritant that enticed the French to attack the English line. It was Henry's smart deployment of his limited troops at a choke point that turned the day. That combined with the era's lack of tactical communication once the battle began, leading to the men-at-arms at the back of the column effectively trapping their comrades in front of them, somewhat similar to a crush you might experience in a crowd at a sporting event. Henry was then able to hit the French with a flank attack.

Combine this with terrible weather and mud and the English holding the high ground, and you've got one of the all-time upsets.

I do believe this is the book you're looking for. There is most definitely a correlation between the two.

Plus some other stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/Face-Battle-Study-Agincourt-Waterloo/dp/0140048979

You'll never go wrong with John Keegan

Wikipedia to the rescue, strangely enough, second reference here, but then again it's hard to ignore a historian of Joyce Lee Malcolm's stature who wrote a book so focused on the subject, and published by Harvard University Press. The book in question which covers this is her 2002 Guns and Violence: The English Experience, per the editorial blurb:

> Malcolm also offers a revealing comparison of the experience in England experience with that in the modern United States. Today Americans own some 200 million guns and have seen eight consecutive years of declining violence, while the English--prohibited from carrying weapons and limited in their right to self-defense have suffered a dramatic increase in rates of violent crime.

Haven't read the book, but remember her comment about the most startling revelation from her research.

The 200 million in 2001 (when the book was in the production process) was low, I'm pretty sure, and now the number is 450 million as a bare minimum to maybe even 600 million guns, with a lot more gun "use" due to the final wave of shall issue or better concealed carry laws.

Which would include every single Constitutional Carry state law except Vermont, which until yesterday had the rare distinction of never restricting guns, although the gun grabbers there as elsewhere in formerly gun friendly states are not daring to take away carry rights. And our violent crime rates continued to drop, until BLM of course, from memory that can be seen in the statistics as of 2015-6. And most of that crime is in states and cities with very restrictive gun laws.

Completely unrelated tidbit that Bing somehow coughed up in my searching, "No Obama documents in Obama library? Historians puzzled by Chicago center plans". Nope, nope, there's no possibility making them only available as scans will be used to hide stuff.

1. The Face of Battle by John Keegan
   
2. 9/10
   
3. War, History, Tactics
   
4. A look at three historical battles (Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme), and the troops that fought in them. A remarkably human look at battle that delves into human psychology, tactics and more.
   
5. The Face of Battle: Amazon.com

How the Scots invented the modern world and everything in it

https://www.amazon.com/Year-1000-First-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

It's time once again for the AskHistorians Book Giveaway! This month we picked two winners: Eric Hacke and Alec Barnaby! The selection of books we have available this month are:

• Eugene Rogan's The Arabs: A History, recommended by /u/cptbuck.
  
  
• Vine Deloria's Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, recommended by /u/snapshot52.
  
  
• Terry Bouton's Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution, recommended by /u/uncovered-history.
  
  
• Eugene Crosby's Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, my recommendation
  
  Want a chance to get a free book? Help support the podcast via Patreon!

For a good general overview of Scotland's history you can't go far wrong with Michael Lynch's Scotland: A New History and my dad says that Neil Oliver's book A History of Scotland is good as well. I've not read it myself, but given that it's aimed at a general audience instead of historians it's possibly more readable than Lynch's book.

For modern Scottish history Tam Devine's book The Scottish Nation: 1700-2007 is a pretty good start. I find him quite readable, but it's more of a social history than a dates and facts history. I've taken against him a bit lately as he keeps sticking his oar in whenever there's a social issue on the go (Rangers going into administration was the latest), but I can't fault him for his knowledge and research work. I've a lot of respect for him as a historian.

The articles on Scottish History on Wikipedia tend to be quite well written, researched and sourced so you might find more specific books and information from their footnotes.

Invented the whole modern world, according to this book. As a Canadian of Scottish descent, I like to think so.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

I'm currently reading this and it's obvious that GRRM has done a great deal of research of this era before putting pen to paper. From the social structures to living conditions, hygiene, rural vs urban living, wars, laws and plagues.

I have nothing to contribute to this excellent comment other than to recommend that the OP read The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, which is an excellent book that answers this very question.

For those interested in a good read about The Somme, check out John Keegan's The Face of Battle.

https://www.amazon.com/Face-Battle-Study-Agincourt-Waterloo/dp/0140048979

Here's a good book that came out in 2000 AD and describes life in England circa 1000 AD.

I'm not denying that Western (and African!) countries do it too. If you aren't in a country like the US where there are easy domestic scapegoats for plutocratic policies, you can pretty nicely emulate the US model by blaming scary foreigners (the backward Koreans! the thieving Japanese! the Muslim/African hordes! Brussels! Trump! The German right wing is now going after American expat waiters and baristas, for Christ sakes!) Never mind that a lot of the legitimate problems with Muslim and African culture were allowed to fester and worsen during colonial times, and in some cases were enabled by greedy Westerners looking to turn the Muslim working classes away from teh sociulizm.

On science and evolution:

Genetics is where it's at. There is a ton of good fossil evidence, but genetics actually proves it on paper. Most books you can get through your local library (even by interlibrary loan) so you don't have to shell out for them just to read them.

Books:

The Making of the Fittest outlines many new forensic proofs of evolution. Fossil genes are an important aspect... they prove common ancestry. Did you know that humans have the gene for Vitamin C synthesis? (which would allow us to synthesize Vitamin C from our food instead of having to ingest it directly from fruit?) Many mammals have the same gene, but through a mutation, we lost the functionality, but it still hangs around.

Deep Ancestry proves the "out of Africa" hypothesis of human origins. It's no longer even a debate. MtDNA and Y-Chromosome DNA can be traced back directly to where our species began.

To give more rounded arguments, Hitchens can't be beat: God Is Not Great and The Portable Atheist (which is an overview of the best atheist writings in history, and one which I cannot recommend highly enough). Also, Dawkin's book The Greatest Show on Earth is a good overview of evolution.

General science: Stephen Hawking's books The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time are excellent for laying the groundwork from Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity through to the modern discovery of Quantum Mechanics.

Bertrand Russell and Thomas Paine are also excellent sources for philosophical, humanist, atheist thought; but they are included in the aforementioned Portable Atheist... but I have read much of their writings otherwise, and they are very good.

Also a subscription to a good peer-reviewed journal such as Nature is awesome, but can be expensive and very in depth.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is also an excellent look at the human mind and genetics. To understand how the mind works, is almost your most important tool. If you know why people say the horrible things they do, you can see their words for what they are... you can see past what they say and see the mechanisms behind the words.

I've also been studying Zen for about a year. It's non-theistic and classed as "eastern philosophy". The Way of Zen kept me from losing my mind after deconverting and then struggling with the thought of a purposeless life and no future. I found it absolutely necessary to root out the remainder of the harmful indoctrination that still existed in my mind; and finally allowed me to see reality as it is instead of overlaying an ideology or worldview on everything.

Also, learn about the universe. Astronomy has been a useful tool for me. I can point my telescope at a galaxy that is more than 20 million light years away and say to someone, "See that galaxy? It took over 20 million years for the light from that galaxy to reach your eye." Creationists scoff at millions of years and say that it's a fantasy; but the universe provides real proof of "deep time" you can see with your own eyes.

Videos:

I recommend books first, because they are the best way to learn, but there are also very good video series out there.

BestofScience has an amazing series on evolution.

AronRa's Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism is awesome.

Thunderfoot's Why do people laugh at creationists is good.

Atheistcoffee's Why I am no longer a creationist is also good.

Also check out TheraminTrees for more on the psychology of religion; Potholer54 on The Big Bang to Us Made Easy; and Evid3nc3's series on deconversion.

Also check out the Evolution Documentary Youtube Channel for some of the world's best documentary series on evolution and science.

I'm sure I've overlooked something here... but that's some stuff off the top of my head. If you have any questions about anything, or just need to talk, send me a message!

You might also try Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism. It's required reading (along with Jared Diamond) for my Master's global history program. One thing to remember about Diamond is that he is not a historian and did not intend to write a history - only a theory of why Europeans were given a leg up with the help of environmental factors. Ecological Imperialism (written 10 years prior to Diamond) that operates on a similar theory but is much more historical and (honestly) isn't as dry or repetitive as Diamond. It's worth noting that while Diamond get's a lot of press and praise his theory is also hotly debated by historians and biologists alike.

Something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

I was thinking more of ideas rather than implementation. These ideas of Capitalism, Liberalism and Imperialism that define the modern world are found really strongly in the UK, then in the Netherlands, Northern France, and they become diluted and changed as they go further from there.

I actually found this one even more enjoyable than Time Traveler’s Guide. The prose is so charming.

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World

The Year 1000 - I read this book in my History of England class back in college. It's one of the few books assigned I actually read cover to cover. It's small, easy to read, and packed with interesting info.

We also read The Virgin Queen by Christopher Hibbert, that was a pretty good non-fiction book on Elizabeth I that reads more like a novel.

It's How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Similar titles include How the Irish Saved Civilization, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, and Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. None of them are by the same author, but they're all interesting historical books with similar titles (How some great culture did great things that built what we have now), none the less.

I would love to find similar titles about other countries, cultures, and civilizations. They're always so interesting!

The book is super awesome.

http://www.amazon.com/Terry-Jones-Medieval-Lives/dp/0563522755

Basically, our notions of what life in the "middle ages" was like is really the Victorians' idea of what it should have been like, to make themselves feel better about their civilization.

I really enjoyed Scotland: A New History, you can get it on Amazon for pennies.

It goes from the Scottish Wars of Independence to modern day Scotland.

Ian Mortimer's A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England is a good, cheap, and readable survey of 14th century life.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

Might I suggest the reading list?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/europe#wiki_middle_ages

And although it's not on the list, I really enjoyed this one:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Travellers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1845950992

This book and it's series of books will tell you most you want to know, from what colors you couldn't wear or what kind of birds you were not allowed to eat. Great detail and fun read.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Tim Pat Coogan is a good start https://www.amazon.co.uk/Troubles-Irelands-Ordeal-1966-1996-Search/dp/1570981442. He's written an accessible series of books about the troubles and modern Irish history

This old site is good if you want to trawl through lots of data.

The BBC used to have a great section for the troubles, but they updated the site and left a lot out. It's still pretty good, just not as good as it once was http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/troubles

Ian Mortimer has a series of Time Traveler’s Guides to X

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/

Possibly one of those?

https://smile.amazon.com/Wars-Roses-Alison-Weir/dp/0345404335

https://smile.amazon.com/Princes-Tower-Alison-Weir/dp/0345391780

https://smile.amazon.com/Reluctant-Queen-Story-Queens-England-ebook/dp/B000VSW7TI

https://smile.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Congratulations! I know what a big step that is, as I've been in the same boat. Books are the best way to become informed. Check out books by:

• Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great & The Portable Atheist
  
  
• Stephen Hawking - The Grand Design & A Briefer History of Time
  
  
• Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
  
  
• Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World
  
  
• Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape & The End of Faith
  
  
• Richard Panek - The 4 Percent Universe
  
  
• Robert Ingersoll - Some Mistakes of Moses
  
  
• Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
  
  
• Sean Caroll - The Making of the Fittest
  
  
• Spencer Wells - Deep Ancestry
  
  
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel
  
  
• Alan Watts - The Way of Zen
  
  Also check out the video series Why I am no longer a creationist.
  
  The more you know, the more confident you will be.

Hi, medieval historian here.

What time period are you interested in, and what region of the world? You probably need to choose one. The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian dark age mythology is what Tolkein's world is based on (north western Europe, c. 500-1100) whilst the early parts of Martin's world is based on England during the Wars of the Roses (1465-1485).

If you've not read history before, getting stuck into a text book can be pretty dry going. What you'll want is some kind of generalistic guide. I recommend the following:

The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England

Concepts of courage on the battlefield change with the technology and its use in warfare. John Keegan has written two books that touch on this - The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command

I just finished this... it was quite good.

> Think of a medieval market where people met at a specific place at a specific time to directly exchange goods

they didn't. They used coins. Minted in silver, roughly 230 pennies to the pound.

>Is this a market?

Yes because they had buyers, sellers, and price tags.

>Is a system of semi-formal gift exchange a market in some sense?

no, it's a gift exchange. Push, not pull. In general:

give someone a gift, you're typically not obligated to reciprocate.

In a white elephant multi-person rotation exchange, everyone must throw one gift into the pot in order to participate. No this isn't a market.

>I think your definition is perfectly reasonable btw, it just seems more like a personal rubric.

It is; that's why I'm trying to see who can poke holes on it. I got it from a Science Paper involving non-humans (mice). So it's an objective standpoint for something not familiar with those price tags (mice).

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World

If you like Monty Python you should like Terry Jones' books. Post-Python he became a medieval historian and written Medieval Lives, Barbarians, and The Crusades. I just read Barbarians (about those who the Romans called barbarians) recently and loved it.

Rubicon by Tom Holland is an excellent account of the fall of the Roman Republic.

I'm currently reading Warriors of God by James Reston about the 3rd Crusade. Its very entertaining but lacks footnotes so I doubt its accuracy. Still for a casual understanding of the 3rd crusade I recommend it.

If you're interested in military history check out Osprey Publishing. These books are very specific but also only 90 pages or with great illustrations.

Finally, if you're looking for historical fiction check out Bernard Cornwell whose written tons of historical novels. He's best known for the Richard Sharpe series about the Napoleonic wars but has also written on Anglo-Saxon England, the American revolution, and elsewhere.

This one is a fun read with some every aspects of life you normally wouldn't think about, Time travelers guide to medieval england http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112894. It deals with the 1300s though.

For anybody interested in learning more about almost everything being discussed in this thread, I highly recommend reading The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. Dr. Carroll is not only a leader in the field of Evo-Devo, he is an excellent writer, making some of the most difficult concepts of the molecular aspects of evolution easy to understand.

If I may suggest a good read on a similar subject: The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer. This is how I wish I had learned about history in school; i.e., not about battles and kings and memorizing dates of treaties, but about how folks were actually living at the time.

Barbara Tuchman was brilliant writer of history.

Albert Camus was a brilliant absurdist philosopher and novelist.

Jared Diamond has written some brilliant books at the intersection of anthropology and ecology. Another good book in this genre is Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World.

Gwynne Dyer is an acclaimed military historian turned journalist on international affairs who has written a number of very engaging books on warfare and politics. His most recent book Climate Wars is the ONE book I would recommend to someone, if so limited, on the subject as it embodies both a wonderful synopsis of the science juxtaposed against the harsh realpolitiks and potential fates of humankind that may unfold unless we can manage to tackle the matter seriously, soon. Another great book on climate change is Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.

For social activists interested in ending world hunger and abject poverty, I can recommend: Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom; Nobel Prize winning micro-financier Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism; UN MDG famed economist Jeffrey Sach's End Of Poverty; and Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea

For anyone of Scottish heritage, I heartily recommend Arthur Hermann's How The Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

For naval history buffs: Robert K. Massie's Dreadnought.

Last, but not least: Robert Pirsig's classic Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Enjoy!

I would stay away from specific studyies of mass murders for now and read some general works for essential background on why the troubles was happening/key moments etc

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Troubles-Conflict-Northern/dp/1561310700

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Troubles-Irelands-Ordeal-1966-1996/dp/1570981442

2 good examples of which there are undoubtedly many.


I'm originally from Northern Ireland myself (and study history at university) so if you have any specific questions feel free to send them my way!

THAT IS WHY WE HAD TO INVENT MODERN CIVILISATION

I've just finished The Windup Girl, which I had been putting off for some time. It was, quite simply, the most astounding and breath-taking science fiction book I've ever read. I loved it.

However, my problem is that I buy books compulsively. Mostly hard copies, but recently I bought a Kindle and buy the odd e-book or two. I have literally hundreds of books on my "to read" list.

One near the top is A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. I recently read her phenomenal Wolf Hall and was blown away by her skills as a story teller. I'm a bit of an armchair historian, and I'm particularly interested in the French Revolution (amongst other things), so I'm very excited by the prospects this book holds. If it's anything like Wolf Hall then I'm in for a very particular treat.

Also near the top lies Quantum - Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar's much lauded recent history of the emergence of quantum mechanics. I very much enjoyed other tangentially related books on this topic, including the wonderful The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Fly in the Cathedral, so this should be good fun and educational to boot.

Having read and loved Everitt's biography of Cicero, I'm very much looking forward to his biographies of Augustus and Hadrian.

I'm listening to an audio-book version of The Count of Monte Cristo on my iPod, which I find rather enjoyable. I've only got through the first half dozen chapters and it's already taken a few hours, so this looks to be a nice, long-term and periodic treat for when I have time alone in the car.

Cronin's The Passage keeps piquing my interest, but I was foolish enough to buy it in that lamentable format, the much cursed "trade paperback", so the thing is a behemoth. The size puts me off. I wish I had waited for a regular paper-back edition. As it is, it sits there on my bookshelf, flanked by the collected works of Alan Furst (what a wonderfully evocative writer of WWII espionage!!) and a bunch of much recommended, but as yet unread, fantasy including The Darkness that Comes Before by Bakker, The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss and Physiognomy by Ford.

Books I have ordered and am eagerly awaiting, and which shall go straight to the top of the TBR list (no doubt to be replaced by next month's purchases) include Orlando Figes's highly regarded history of The Crimean War, Rosen's history of steam The Most Powerful Idea in the World and Stacy Schiff's contentious biography of Cleopatra.

A bit of a mixed bunch, all up, I'd say.

How the Scots invented the modern world by Arthur Herman

10/10

https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

The mi5 wasn't around when the empire was.

This is a great read about the empire by Lawrence James just if anyone is interested in history.

I would go as far as to say the whole british empire was counting peanuts compared to the US Empire.

And they should have learned from mi6 not mi5 if they want to deal with foreigners. They could share some knowledge on economical warfare.

Hi!

My name is Ed McDonald and I'm a fantasy author. My debut is going to be released across 6 languages in 2017/18, so I have some insights on this. I am looking forward to Blackwing being published so that I don't have to write this as a disclaimer all the time :D. I'm also speaking on a panel about getting published in fantasy at the London Book Fair in March.

Firstly, read fantasy. All the fantasy. But it's more important to read the things that are currently being published than it is the classics. You won't learn much from Tolkien these days, times have changed since LOTR. Instead, if it's epic fantasy you want to write, then you need to read Rothfuss, Sanderson, Abercrombie, Lawrence and Lynch. They are the big sellers for epic. If you want to write YA stuff then read YA stuff. This is not just because those writers are great, but because it will teach you the market trends.

Next though, reading outside the genre is great, but only to find books that you enjoy so that you can cut them apart. My guilty pleasure? Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. They frequently have glaring plot holes or don't make sense, and are full of deus ex machina resolutions or just "and then Jack blew his head off" finales, but the pace and the simplicity keeps me turning the page. And from that, I learned that I much prefer a Reacher novel to trudging through 5 pages of world building at a time, so when I write fantasy, I write fast paced thrillers which is what then sold Blackwing around the world. I wouldn't have gained that style without reading outside the genre.

Finally, I guess I'm cheating because I have some degrees in history, but if you're writing historically inspired settings, you ought to be reading some history. Don't try to plough through dry academic texts if you aren't a historian though - I'm an academic and even I find those dry as sand. Get the popular stuff, even kid's history, just to try to soak up the feel of the period. The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England is essential for those that want to gain a quick overview.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486802982&sr=1-1&keywords=the+time+traveller%27s+guide+to+medieval+england

I write a blog that mainly focuses on assisting aspiring authors such as yourself and you may find some of it helpful.

https://edmcdonaldwriting.com/2017/01/25/you-are-not-george-rr-martin-how-to-get-published-in-the-grimdark-era-of-fantasy/

Apparently the map is from this book: Countries we've Ever Invaded

Some of the territories are very tenuous... so 'Invade' needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

This book is an engaging and quick read if you'd like to know more about Evolution from the viewpoint of how the micro- begets the macro-biology.

I really enjoyed The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium

Another good one that comes to mind is London: The Biography

Also, if you're on FB, there are some pretty cool groups for UK history enthusiasts that you might want to join/check out. I bet if you asked this question in one of those groups (I used to be in a couple, but am not on FB anymore) you'd get a lot of feedback.

> How do you rebutt Christians who claim that prophecies like [Isaiah 53] predicted Jesus and his death?

This is a very, very complex passage. There are literally entire books about proper interpretation of ancient texts; say what you want about the legitimacy of OT scripture, it is a historical document that requires an understanding of the context and culture of its writing. For a brief primer, check this out.

>I have parents that are anti-evolution but know nothing about it. What can I do (if anything) to show them that evolution is fact.

You can do nothing if they are unwilling to investigate it on their own. Being against something you are (willfully) ignorant of is, with all due respect, the epitome of ineptitude.

>Not some wacky theory that some drunken scientist came up with after beating his wife, but fact.

I'm honestly not aware of any well publicized scientific theory that originated from a drunken, wife beating scientist, so there's nothing I can contrast this with. (However, I'm convinced John was on shrooms when he wrote Revelation) If there is any hope, I would begin with the proper explanation of what a "theory" is in the scientific perspective. To simplify (and probably over-simplify), something can still be a theory, scientifically, but also be a fact.

As a demonstration, I would tell them to jump off a bridge. After all, gravity is only a theory.

>Have a favourite Dawkins quote? :)

Yup.

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

>What single argument was the single greatest point in debunking your creationism? (I ask because I often debate creationists).

Genetics. By far. The DNA evidence is astounding. I highly suggest The Relics of Eden and The Making of the Fittest.

>f I have any questions about the Bible I'll be sure to message you. You sound quite knowledgable on it. Cheers!

I would welcome it. At least I could now put some practical use to all this knowledge in my head. :)

There's this, albeit a different time period: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/1439112908/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=BKTCY0V8K7XD&coliid=I1B9AZ44XS0SEO

and also this fun desktop background: http://i.imgur.com/zXFY5.jpg

edit: of course a dozen people have already posted this - what was I thinking?

Keegan's The Face of Battle is a really good account of the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the First Day on the Somme. He gets into what each battle was like on a personal level for the soldiers.

I believe the map is from/based on information in this book.

This is the book I would recommend as a starting point to the subject. It is The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Cannadine.

The premise is that it was a combination of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of popular democracy, and the effects of two world wars that led to the British nobility losing so much of their hold over the country in less than a century.

I would add that you really can't underestimate the effect of the First World War on that transformation. First, it was an opportunity for the lower classes to see how completely inept many of their supposed social superiors were, in ineptly leading them into a seemingly pointless and incredibly bloody war. Secondly, the crippling debt incurred by Britain during the war and the ensuing economic crisis. And thirdly, many of the young officers in the British Army during the First World War were scions of the nobility, and the casualty rate among those officers was severe. While the phrase "Lost Generation" might be a bit much, it is not going too far to say that the loss of so many future Dukes, Earls, Viscounts, and Peers did have an effect on the break up of the British Aristocracy.

MFE,

We’ve had such a delightful string of evenings “together” that I’m only now finally finishing responding to your foreign film message. : )

I’ve seen Seven Samurai, but I think that’s the only one of Kurosawa’s that I’ve seen and I’m afraid I don’t remember it too well. What do you like about his works?

Watching the trailers, I see a lot of parallels to American westerns. How much influence did Kurosawa have on them or they on him?

Ran looks so elegant to me, but I can’t tell if that’s just the score and the way the trailer is cut. Dreams looks amazing. Also, as I watched the trailer, the voiceover wording going from “as a child” to “as a man” struck me. Are there things in Kurosawa’s films that speak to the man you have been, the man you are, and/or the man you are becoming (not that you need to become any different than you are, but we are all constantly changing and growing).

I haven’t seen Tampopo or the trilogy. You calling them tops means I definitely need to see them at some point. : )

Have I told you how much I love Fifth Element? Yet, I haven’t seen any of his others. I love, love, love that the right song was needed before the chase could commence. Oh, and how funny about the guy throwing up. You’d think that’d be par for the course with the driving that goes into a car chase, yet I’ve never seen that shown!

The line from Clockwise about him showing off his muscles and her egging him on reminded me of us: you showing your mental muscle in so many ways and me very much appreciating and enjoying your displays of intellectual prowess.

Nightwatch and Daywatch look mesmerizing. I don’t watch a lot of horror, but those look very good and well worth the chills.

Oh, how have I let myself slip into so much work and so few movies? La Vie En Rose looks amazing! : )

I’ll return the favor, but I notice as I think back on the foreign language films I enjoy that I’ve rarely seen any of them more than once or twice. I think that gets down to the whole multi-tasking thing and in-home media entertainment tending to be a backdrop for manual activities.

And now I’m laughing at how that came out, but I’m going to leave it in just in case you get a laugh out of it too. : )

So, the foreign film that really sticks out for me is Life is Beautiful. The idea that a man could have such a soul as to create that world of charming adventure for his child in a concentration camp blows me away.

(These are more in order of how much I can remember about them rather than in order of favorites.)

The next one I’ve seen enough to remember is Das Boot. War isn’t my first choice of relaxing subject matters, but I think it’s a beautiful film. It has that Ran elegance about it. While the war part isn’t a draw, I love technology and you know how I feel about water, so submarines are pretty amazing. I’ve enjoyed tremendously the ones (all docked) that I’ve toured.

The film 3 Iron (which seems available in its entirety is a quietly surreal piece that leaves you wondering at the end what really happened.

Pan’s Labrynth was visually complex with many scary and rough moments that were are richly detailed as they were discomforting.

O’Horton was just cute. It wasn’t a top favorite, but it’s a warm, sweet film.

The rest I have just the barest memories of, but they all were compelling enough that I’d watch them again if time allowed for it. They include [Like Water for Chocolate] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqm8_GjKDBc), Fanny and Alexander, and [Babette’s Feast] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvNifgj_dv4).

I feel like I have seen this one, but I’m not positive. : )

>And I love to make you smile

: ) You telling me that widens the one you’d already put there. : )

>How is it the Poms seem to have a corner on the Science-Fiction-Comedy?

Just from comparing the wiki pages on British humor and sci fi, I wonder if some of the fit is because the invented portions of people, worlds, and mechanisms are easy targets for sarcasm and the awkwardness of some to function in those unique and demanding settings for self-deprecation. Additionally, humor based on insensitivity to cultural differences can be more acceptable when the culture being joked about is fictional.

I think the inventiveness of Brits (in which the Scots seemed to play no mean role) plays well into a genre called a “literature of ideas” and that depends on the reader/viewer’s ability to be comfortable with new and unusual scientific explanations and solutions .

>Just plain not freezing properly and ruining it for one of the audience...letting someone down.

Oh, that plays into so many things we’ve talked about, doesn’t it? I’ve mentioned the utter enjoyment a woman can have being active around a man even when he prefers to be more staid, and the thought that you might worry even about your ability to be appropriately staid makes my heart go out to you. Yes, I do know the part, though, to do with worrying about letting someone down. Given our conversations about what I do not feel comfortable with in terms of adventure, mine seems to run the opposite course in worrying about my ability to be appropriately active without causing anyone emotional or physical harm.

>Had the old magazine kept moving along, I would probably still be doing it.

I will direct my wishes toward whatever you want to have happen whether it’s to be done with magazine editing or to have some opportunity that you would like materialize. I don’t think it’s a secret that I admire your mind, spirit, and writing. You have a gift, but how you will most enjoy that gift is completely up to you. : )

The Dakar video was amazing. That would be so awesome to do. I read a little bit about Dakar rally and learned what erg is. What would be your vehicle of choice for the rally?

Sama Amie seems to capture well the intensity, risk, and vibrance of the rally as well as the simple of joy of pursuing something complex and thrilling. : )

The headings are great on the picture of the issue cover you linked, and what a great image! : )

>My reporting writing isn't all that great.

I’m sure you know my default is both to beg to differ because of the high qualities I see in your writing while simultaneously deferring to your self-knowledge. Why do you think it isn’t great?

>At the eleventh hour the entire rally was cancelled due to terrorism/security concerns.

I’m so sorry that happened. The world will never know all the little dealings for good that get lost in the vast mis-shufflings of greed.

>Which one would you like me to post?

Please choose what you would like to give me. Your writing of any sort is a gift to me. I’d love for you to pick something out. : )

>sock...black the next day. And the next...

So if I see you in jet, onyx, ebony, obsidian, slate, or raven, I know something has gone terribly wrong, right? : )

>I have to try and figure out who's chopping onions in my front room, can't seem to find 'em.

Good to know I’m not the only one who has welled up on more than one occasion. You fill me with joy to the point of it overflowing onto my cheeks and past my through-my-tears smiles.

better lAte than never

Edit: corralling links

Maybe Richard Shannon's two-volume biography?

Gladstone: Peel's Inheritor, 1809-1865 (1982)

Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865-1898 (1999)

See also David Cannadine's Victorious Century (2017) and his book The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990), part of the AskHistorians booklist. There are countless threads in this subreddit about the Victorian Era.

It can be dangerous to go alone. Take this!

PART II

BUT there are problems with your prose too

There are times where you really do TELL us stuff that you should not.

>We had no idea of the horrors that lay ahead, only that the world we left was not alone. Someone had made a life here, someone not of our land, so it stood to reason that there were more of them out there and a new land that perhaps we could call home.


This is a bad TELL. Don’t let us know there is more horrors. Let us discover them as the narrator does.

Don’t tell us that people made a life here. SHOW us that they did.

> the scene was a thousand times more unsettling than before

This almost made me puke. This is terrible. DO NOT SAY SOMETHING WAS 1000X MORE UNSETTLING. Show us this. It is that simple. SHOW us why it was unsettling. Describe the scene, and let us revel in the quiet horror that you paint.

> I understood then that he was never a coward, but that he simply could not bear the sight of more death. Ironically, his exile brought him in contact with more death than we ever saw at home.


A thousand times NO. You CANNOT tell someone the point of the story. You MUST trust your reader to figure it out. If you do, then your ending will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

At other times, you use ineffective language:

> and cities buzzed like beehives,

This really tells us nothing. It really doesn’t. HOW do they buzz? What are the people doing (or what does the narrator imagine they are doing) that they are buzzing?

OK, on the whole there is middling-to-bad prose, with moments of just absolute mind-boggling brilliance. If you can practice your prose and get it all up the point of the first 4 paragraphs, you will dazzle all those who read your stuff.

You are a LONG-ASS way from this. But the fact is that you can do it. You have done it. You just need to train your writing so that you do it all the time.

So, get to it.

WORLD BUILDING/CONSISTENCY

There are a LOT of problems here. You don’t really lay out a accurate view of the black death. You have the characters describe artifacts that they have never encountered – using words that are commonly used by people familiar with these artifacts. You have them know things about the world they cannot (e.g. like which houses are better built, when they have never seen houses like it).

This is a major problem – but it is an EASY problem to solve

First, decide when you think this occurred. THEN, read a 2-6 books each on the periods of time – both in the Americas and Europe. This will give you a sense of what is reasonable to expect in the Europe setting and what the native Americans would be used to seeing (and not seeing).

If you want to go for the middle ages, I suggest the following (for Europe): The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. I have no good suggestions for the Americas.

Again, as written the world you have is not good enough to be credible, but this is readily solved via some research.

So, get to it.

CONCLUSIONS

I don’t say this often (ever?). You have the beginnings of an amazing story. Your strongest asset is your moments of amazing prose, and the fact that you have already established compelling characters with so little. If you expand this, while maintaining what is good and correcting what is bad, you will have quite a story. But there is much work to be done. You need a more fleshed out plot. You need more -- and more active -- characters, and you need a more believable story. NONE of these are problems that cannot be solved.

So…Get to it. :)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0609809997?pc_redir=1410434164&robot_redir=1

Just finished "Secret Affairs:Britain's collusion with radical Islam" by Mark Curtis. The author did a lot of research and sited hundreds of sources from interviews, documents, news articles, etc. The link to amazon is here

The book I read.

I thought this book was a great introduction to evolution for me when I took it up. Chapter 2 is a bit difficult, but otherwise right there for a beginner like me. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution Reprint Edition
by Sean B. Carroll
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Fittest-Ultimate-Forensic-Evolution/dp/0393330516

This is my favourite: http://www.amazon.ca/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

I highly recommend reading the Agincourt chapter of John Keegan's "The Face of Battle". Keegan talks about what a French soldier would have experienced on an individual level, something that was largely absent from discussions of warfare before Keegan wrote this book in the early 1970s.

Apperently there's a book. https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Countries-Weve-Ever-Invaded/dp/0752479695

Haven't read it though.

Sure, happy to talk about this forever, hahaha.

First of all, I have been DMing for 30 years this month :-) So many things that are simple separately, can seem complex as you collect many of them over the years. For example crossing terrain, climate, type of country (empire, wasteland, feudal, democracy, etc.) and political/war status is something you end up doing naturally like using a clutch in a car, and each element (fresh produce doesn't last, salt makes food last so is as valuable as electricity, specially inland) separately makes sense but all of them together seem a load to remember, just go one at a time.

Second, I read a book that made things a lot simpler: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travellers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1845950992 - this helped me describe road qualities, relationship with authorities and law, segment the population, describe food, construction and town layouts very vividly. You also learn in this book how to price things accurately to make sense in old times.

Third, I do medieval fencing which taught me a few things about fighting that lets me describe battles a little more colourfully. For example having a sargeant shouting "don't break formation" or having a lord apply a levy tax because there is a military threat from his rival (and brother). Also, you can describe how a fighter changes their stance, and you tell your PC level 9 fighter "he changed his back foot for the spear side and is changing his grip, he is coming at you" rather than say "you won initiative". They feel every so clever after this.

Fourth, when going to a museum, historical site (castle, hastings, battle site) I take a look at something from the 5th-15th century and save some summary of it in my head (or even photograph and record it with today's tech, so I can say "the arrow slit covers the road approaching the gate but there is a blind spot when they are closer than 5 metres" or "the round clay tablet starts and ends with a flower shape, has heads with and without beards, bear skins, dotted circles and seems to be in a spiral". I also play with a laptop and can google an image of what I mean and show it to them, then have to save it to a folder with a name that is easy to find later if needed.

Lastly, I have a kind of structure for every town: it has a central square, usually a motte and bailey all the way up to the castle (depending on size), a market, a lord who is known, a lady who is known even more, gossip about them, a source of water, and add one cultural meme: a news bearer that walks around with a horn, a cleric that tolls a bell in the mornings, a monk that walks around gathering people to mass, a local drunk, a charismatic bard, whatever. I steal these memes or characters from books or films but then change them so they are not recognisable, so for example you can have a farmer boy like Hodor, or a hobbit like Willow, or a pair of fools like Laurel and Hardy (tweaked to be unrecognizable).

By having this pieces or history or literature saved in your toolbox, you can piece together a very complex scenario which is also historically accurate, but not as dense as a history lesson, just agile enough for it to be an adventure game, but rich enough to be a story.
There is a lot more one can do, but that I think is pretty simple and cumulative so over a period of time your descriptions become a bit more immersive and helps your players engage a bit more.

For a quick, interesting view of life in the medieval period, try the book "The Year 1000". It offers a day-to-day perspective on life in that year alone. Of course there were good and bad aspects of daily life, much like there are now. http://www.amazon.com/Year-1000-First-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

It goes way beyond the banjo. The Scots invented all kinds of things.

Damn Canadians! Oh, wait...

This was a good read, even if the author did stretch a couple of points to make his case: http://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

No, it's the first chapter of a book by a renowned left wing journalist and historian. I just didn't want to link to Amazon for fear of being accused of marketing. But, here you go.

Archives for the links in comments:

• By hga_another (en.wikipedia.org): http://archive.fo/KReNP
  
• By hga_another (bbc.co.uk): http://archive.fo/XaGMS
  
• By hga_another (thecommentator.com): http://archive.fo/T2t4x
  
• By GarrysMassiveGirth (takimag.com): http://archive.fo/QGlxR
  
• By quelques_heures (telegraph.co.uk): http://archive.fo/7XsSf
  
• By hga_another (en.wikipedia.org): http://archive.fo/IQZRo
  
  
• By hga_another (amazon.com): http://archive.fo/KQzrW
  
• By deleteseverything (wikileaks.org): http://archive.fo/JEIiC
  
• By deleteseverything (wikileaks.org): http://archive.fo/JEIiC
  
• By ValidAvailable (reddit.com): http://archive.fo/GCKTd
  
• By hga_another (en.wikipedia.org): http://archive.fo/QwYuE
  
  
• By hga_another (en.wikipedia.org): http://archive.fo/YTiwT
  
  
• By hga_another (amazon.com): http://archive.fo/bHXJz
  
• By drunkjake (en.wikipedia.org): http://archive.fo/cE4Gz
  
• By Victorhcj (voat.co): http://archive.fo/TxdBA
  
  ----
  I am Mnemosyne 2.1, I rate this link 3 out of 5 stars, "it was ok" ^^^^/r/botsrights ^^^^Contribute ^^^^message ^^^^me ^^^^suggestions ^^^^at ^^^^any ^^^^time ^^^^Opt ^^^^out ^^^^of ^^^^tracking ^^^^by ^^^^messaging ^^^^me ^^^^"Opt ^^^^Out" ^^^^at ^^^^any ^^^^time

There's a book listing all the place that GB invaded. https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Countries-Weve-Ever-Invaded/dp/0752479695/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=we+have+invaded&qid=1567781762&s=gateway&sr=8-2 Conversely the list of places that invaded GB in the past is everyone with good enough ships.

There's a similar book for the USA it's 110 pages longer.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It <----required reading for participation

Literally got that from this book.

I read that civilians came around at night after the battle of Waterloo looting corpses and the wounded and even murdering some of them first.

I suggest reading this for anyone interested in first hand accounts from the Napoleonic wars

Probably a lot more detail than you're asking for, but this is a great, easy to read book on what medieval europe was actually like to live in.

I HIGHLY recommend Keegan's The Face of Battle, particularly the chapter on Agincourt. He talks at great length and in great depth about the use of the bow on the battlefield. While it's a different battle, a different war (400 years after Hastings), and a different type of bow, it nonetheless is immensely helpful in imagining the impact ranged weapons might have had on a medieval battlefield.

In specific terms of Hastings, it's a bit hard to calculate the impact that bows had upon the battle. The English side had only a smattering of bowmen, while about a quarter of the Norman army were bowmen, so we can at least say that the victors had more bowmen. Additionally, Harold II, leader of the losing side's army, might have been killed by an arrow in the eye (this is a controversial topic, however, so I urge caution).

On the other hand, there's some indication that the Norman archers weren't particularly decisive, either. They were firing uphill, and most of their arrows either bounced off the enemy's shields or flew harmlessly over their heads. Furthermore, the Norman archers were ironically hindered by the lack of arrows being loosed back at them, which meant that no arrows were available once their supplies ran out. When the English responded with ranged attacks of their own, they mostly consisted of axes, javelins, and stones, rather than arrows.

I don't know the answers to your specific questions, but I found Ian Mortimer's "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" to be an enjoyable read which addresses the lives of ordinary people. Check it out: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Life in a Medieval Village

https://www.amazon.ca/Life-Medieval-Village-Frances-Gies/dp/0060920467

Come now, that's too sweet of you. And yeah, I myself am imprisoned by my books too. I dread the ideas of moving due to the sheer amount of books I have. I thought I was done with it since I bought a kindle 5 years ago but I threw it away after half a year 'cause I could not be without my hardcover books. And sometimes I feel like putting a good book under my pillow or on my night stand makes me feel closer to the book itself. Now if only I can read everything that I own is another problem...

Those are some solid suggestions. I definitely would love to devour...I mean read and appreciate them someday. I have to finish House of Leaves first. Goddamn it's exhausting to read that book but also quite rewarding. I also just ordered The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Was thinking about either medieval time or the growth of the Silk Road and ended up with medieval time.

We are such book worms, aren't we? I'd feel so bad if I end up with someone who doesn't like books 'cause I would be so boring and reading all the time.

The guys in the monasteries , but they would have been in Ireland, up near Scotland and on some of the islands.

You would pretty much be looking for the people producing the illuminated manuscripts. The years are off by a bit but take a look at the Iona Monastery and The Book of Kells as starting points

You might also take a look at the pop history book, The Year 1000, by Lacey and Danziger. It focuses on life in England at the turn of the first millennium.



http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-1000-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

Book I have heard good things about on the subject. Hopefully, I will get a chance to read it soon.

https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Affairs-Britains-Collusion-Radical/dp/1846687640

This is a good place to start: http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/031216985X

The wikipedia articles have citations. You are refusing to accept them, and your only counter argument to the parts I cite are claims that these estimates are not accurate. You have not cited any reason to believe these estimates are inaccurate, other than your belief. I don't mean to be rude, but this sounds like a conspiracy.

But, I digress. I'll do the manual labor of copying the citations from more reputable sources.

First claim

> Clergy entered the country secretly and although services were illegal they were maintained.

You can find this in this book on page 289.


> The Roman Catholic hierarchies were restored in England and Wales in 1850 and in
> Scotland in 1878, and from this point greater effort seems to have been made to
gather statistics in a more systematic fashion, albeit with minimal standardization and
quality control.

Second claim:

> Another estimate for 1764 is of 13,166 Catholics in the Highlands, perhaps a quarter of whom had emigrated by 1790,[27] and another source estimates Catholics as perhaps 10% of the population

This can be found in this book on page 387.

Because it is an estimate, let's see if we can find other sources.

Here are some maps from the mid 19th-century which estimate that Scotland was mostly protestant, and seems to corroborate the 10% claim (it's hard to interpret the exact numbers, but it's definitely a minority).

> In 1923, the Church of Scotland produced a pamphlet calling for a racially pure Scotland and demanding the removal of Catholics. The pamphlet was titled, "The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality". This again goes against your claim that Catholicism could have been a dominant religion in Scotland.

The existence of this pamphlet is corroborated by this source and a copy of its text.

> Church of Scotland is part of the government of the United Kingdom

The Church of Scotland points out that it was only granted freedom from the UK parliament in 1921, although I will admit, it seems to function more independently today, than I claimed.

I really enjoyed this book.

I read it shortly after this http://www.amazon.com/The-Most-Powerful-Idea-World/dp/1400067057/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3 and they went very well together.

Also it went well with the BBC's "The Making of Modern Medicine" radio program.

Didn't have a reason to. I'm on summer break between second and third year of a phd program, but I am fairly sure that I want to leave the program, so I'm now devoting my time toward job hunting online.

Also, none of my friends called me about hanging out last night, and I go to the gym six days a week but yesterday was my day off. Had enough groceries to get by. Net result is me shuffling between my room, kitchen, bathroom, and living room exclusively.

I spent my time yesterday looking for jobs, but mainly getting distracted by stupid shit on the internet. I read some of a book I've started recently, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Also smoked a little weed, but as of today I am quitting until I find a job or a dissertation topic. I am also a month into the /r/nofap challenge, so porn and jerking it was not an option.

This is a similar themed book, and a great read, written by Ian Mortimer. There is one for medieval and one for Elizabethan Britain, written as if you had just dropped into a different time and what you would experience there.

Excellent show!

I watched the whole thing last night (pity about the quality), then realised I could just buy the book (which I did).

Terry Jones: Medieval Lives

I read Beyond the Deep and Blind Descent over the summer. Both are about supercave exploration, which it turns out is the most terrifying thing on earth. Both are in the same genre as Into Thin Air, another horribly scary book about things I will never ever do. I'd recommend reading Blind Descent first because it's the more general book, while Into the Deep is about one specific exploration. Both are absolutely mandatory reading if you're planning on seeing that new James Cameron movie that comes out in February.

On the history front, April 1865 by Jay Winik is a superb analysis of the last month of the Civil War. Lincoln's Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk is a great analysis of Lincoln's lifelong battle with depression. And Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby is one of the most interesting history books I've read in a long time. This may be a good follow-up to Guns, Germs, and Steel if you're interested in environmental history.

Like I said, I'm an exmuslim. You're gonna lecture ME about criticising Islam? I don't need you to tell me there are legitimate criticisms of Islam, just as there are of Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and Sikhism and Buddhism. But your starting point is that because this terrorist was Muslim we should assume all Muslims ascribe to such beliefs. Do you even logic?

>Islam is very right wing

No, wahhabi Islam spread by the Saudi government that (a) the British government created and installed and (b) continues to be propped up by the UK and US, is right wing and intolerant. You may not have heard of Sufi Islam, for instance, but that's your own ignorance. Your argument is analogous to saying than Christianity is terrible because of the Westboro Baptist Church

>with the overwhelming number of terror attacks linked to Islam


After El Paso, right-wing terrorists have killed more people on US soil than jihadis have.. You might also want to pick yourself a copy of Mark Curtis's Secret Affairs.

Facts don't fit your narrative, mate, what are you going to do?

I'm not shutting down discussion. I'm telling you that your position is wrong, or worse, malicious. Discuss away.

I'll note of course that even the truths that existed in the fictionalization took a very small part of what was going on during the time and made it fit the series, and also that I'm not an expert (I would however strongly recommend The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Cannadine).
From my point of view, there is something to be said for the stability of the estates, as well as the the fact that they generally are architecturally and architecturally important. When an estate went under, what occurred was essentially a fire sale, pieces being sold off piece by piece. There is also very much a labor demand created by these, now 100+ year old estates to keep them up to date, and to now make them tourism attractions (which helps pay for the upkeep). I'm not sure that's really an elegant defense of estates, but just a few things that quickly come to the top of my head as examples.

Here are three books on very different topics that could pique your interest in something new:Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby; The Mission of Friar Rubruck by Willem Van Ruysbroeck; Magic in the Middle Ages by Richard Kieckhefer.

Anyone interested in medieval peasant life should check out Life in a Medieval Village. It's actually really interesting to see how they lived and is backed up pretty well.

I'm not an expert, but I believe books were relatively rare things during this time period. Also, an extensive library during that time might seem quite small by today's standards. Only the well to do, universities, and monasteries would have significant libraries. The vast majority of people didn't own a book, not even a Bible or religious text. I'm basing this half-baked answer off of what I recall from Ian Mortimers's book http://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-1000-Millennium-Englishmans/dp/0316511579

Great book!

Surprisingly, not true. Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Guide-Medieval-England/dp/1439112908

Linen undergarments were surprisingly good at absorbing sweat and oil, so as long as *those* were clean (changed and washed frequently) people didn't stink like you would expect. Further since the common knowledge at the time was that disease could be caused by 'miasma' or bad air it was important not to stink.

Medieval cleanliness standards were different from today, not nonexistant.

I'm a big fan of lucky 13!

Terry Jones' Medieval Lives is 13 bucks. I would add it to my books WL, too if I weren't having trouble deciding how to categorize my WLs. Heheheh.

Rise and Fall of British Empire: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/031216985X/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/182-1086876-3149244

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 is an alternative that I've been recommended.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

• UK: amazon.co.uk
  
• Spain: amazon.es
  
• France: amazon.fr
  
• Germany: amazon.de
  
• Japan: amazon.co.jp
  
• Canada: amazon.ca
  
• Italy: amazon.it
  
• China: amazon.cn
  
  
  This bot is currently in testing so let me know what you think by voting (or commenting).

> documentary on BBC with a list of the top 7 British inventions ... the penicillin, telephone, etc

Fleming was a Scot, so was Bell along with many others.

Here's a good reading suggestion in this vein;

https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/0609809997

Islamism is also far right and in many cases is funded by the same NATO-powers that fund other right-wing ideologies, in Chile for instance

Not really related, but I always found it interesting that Virginia got its name by virtue of an English attempt to inspire settlers to move to the territory by invoking the image of a "young virgin awaiting the loss of her maidenhead".

Source- https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-British-Empire/dp/031216985X

The Scots invented the Modern World