Anyone else around here grow up watching documentaries? Yeah, I still do. Better still, is I’ve found the bookish equivalent to the hour long documentaries I’ve seen a thousand times over. It’s a series called Hourly History, and I love it.
With just enough pages to both cover off the basics of the topic and keep your reading time to under an hour, they’re filling a rad niche for me at the moment when it comes to ‘Must read history, don’t want to be stuck all day’. It helps that the topics are wide and varied, too.
Here are some of the titles I’ve read this year – and their one sentence reviews. I’m just going to keep adding to this as the year wears on.
If you’ve got any history books to recommend, slide on into my DMs and make yourself known.
King George VI: I wonder what he’d make of the current royals.
American History in 50 Events: Solid, has given me a stack of more hysterical events to delve into.
The Black Death: Nasty, but fascinating.
Vlad the Impaler: Lestat wishes he was Vlad.
Alexander Hamilton: I’ll bet he was in the room when it happened.
The Mayflower: This made more sense after reading The History of Britain in 50 Events.
The History of China in 50 Events: You may be surprised to see how much of modern civilisation the Chinese are responsible for – and not just your lemon chicken or racist memes.
Nikola Tesla: I really wish people had listened to this dude.
Mayan Civilisation: I’m not saying it was aliens . . .
The History of Britain in 50 Events: I’ve always loved British/medieval/Tudor history, so I guess it was a given that I’d love this?
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