Like many people, I have much more time to listen to audiobooks than I do to read books. Unfortunately, the choice of academic histories available on Audible etc is pretty limited, and can be difficult to find anything good when you're trawling through 15 pages of titles like The Incredible True Story of The Marines of X Company. Particularly when you are looking to learn about new eras or regions and you don't recognise any of the more interesting authors working in the field.

So I thought we could maybe have a monthly or fortnightly feature focused entirely on history audiobooks.

Perhaps this could be the first: slightly passe, I suppose, but I recently finished Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule, and The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist, both on Audible. They were each excellent in their own way, although I found Baptist to be rather overwritten. And he strangely loses his way from an economic history of slavery told "from below" between 1850 and 1860 to make it a more or less "straight" political history of American slavery. But the early chapters of the book are excellent, particularly when he forgets about his metaphors and concentrates on allowing enslaved people to describe the economic system they were in in their own words.

I've been reading a lot online recently about historical battles, and one thing I've heard again and again is a description of a "press" of scared, angry men (mostly holding sharp things) all shoving and pushing against each other in what must have been a chaotic/frightening event (a battle, shieldwall, etc). I have also recently seen some videos of crowd disasters at events (e.g. shows, sports games).

My question is, how common would it be for soldiers to simply be crushed to death by their own (or the other) side in a pre-gunpowder battle, and do we know how much this varied from army to army and from time to time (I could imagine it may be possible a significant amount of a well trained army's training may possibly have been to avoid this)?

Thank you in advance

My question is, do we know

Recently I saw a historian on twitter talking about the fact that the term "Anglo-Saxon" isn't used by most historians anymore. Unfortunately, I can't find the thread anymore to get more information. Is this true, and if so is it a result of the changing way that scholars think about early English history or is it due to white supremacist use of the term?

So I was just thinking if these civilisations try to explore anything beyond where they lived. I'm more particularly interested if the Aztecs and Mayans tried sailing east towards Africa, for example. Were they sailors at all?

Ex, In the movie "The man in the iron mask", pesant clothes look like they haven't been washed in weeks/months. White clothes so dirt stained they were red/brown.
I'm aware that people washed clothes, but was it common to let them get that kind of bad first?

I live in an intentional community and have been asked to help homeschool one of the kids living here in history classes. I asked the kid (14yo) what he wanted to learn about and he was interested in medieval Ireland with a focus on knights, royalty, as well as some darker themes, like capital punishment. I have very little knowledge of Irish history and was planning on looking into some books to provide the material. The kid and I would then engage in critical thinking discussions around what we're reading. My hope is to approach the subject with a focus on historiography, as well as conflicting perspectives and takes on the history. Ideally, I would love several recommendations to form a curriculum for a few months!

Even if we assume they're both playing a bit younger, that still puts the characters in the 38-45 range. This contrasts with other accounts I've heard of men in their mid-20s being referred to as "Grandpa", suggesting that most men in combat roles were between 18-23.

As an aside, it seems that Hanks' character was drafted but still became a Captain. Was this possible at the time?

I've read that a big reason the UK abolished slavery peacefully was that the population wasn't self-sustaining in the West Indies and so abolishing the slave trade naturally lead to its abolition 26 years later. So is that true? Why was the American population self-sustaining while the West Indies' wasn't? The nature of cotton vs sugar cultivation? The climate? Was Brazil closer to the West Indies or the US?

Hello everyone, I’ve recently stumbled upon the tale/myth of the alleged founding of the City Byzantion by Byzas, a legendary Dorian General and coloniser. Of course, in the subsequent future, the city became known as Constantinople, and thus was one of the more important cities in the late antiquity and the Middle Ages, as it became the capital of the eastern Roman Empire. This got me thinking - Did medieval „Byzantines“ adhere to Ancient Greek culture, philosophy and mythology, as in- was the alleged founding of Byzantion by Byzas an accepted and maybe even revered story( Like Virgils Aeneid in Ancient Rome), or did the Byzantine empire completely denounce any ties to Ancient Greece and, with it, all alleged myths and tales that came with it?Thanks in advance!

*edit for those who's comments have been removed, I was able to read them before they were removed and your answers have been helping.

I'm currently interested in the history of precolumbian Americas, and I'd like to read books about Inca Empire. Hoever, I didnt find any really interesting. Could you propose me some that you read or heard about?

PS. I dont like books full of dates. I think that the books like the Norman Davies ones are more interesting.

I couldn’t find any sources that didn’t involve using the Bible as proof of these series of events. I’m curious if the Egyptians ever recorded some or all of these events in their perspective. In my eyes, any source outside the Bible makes the story of Moses more credible. Is the story of Moses, specifically in reference to his dispute with an Egyptian pharaoh for the freedom of his people, have any evidence of it happening? Does it have any historical basis outside of the Bible?