People have been clamoring for a better Booklist for a long time, and we’ve been listening! We're happy to announce, after a month of tag-team mass data entry, that the Booklist has been copied to Goodreads. Not everyone’s familiar with Goodreads of course, but the basic definition is that it’s a remarkably addictive combo of personal book database and social media platform.

The main thing for us is that with the Goodreads Booklist you can now do two key things people have been asking for: search the list, and easily find books about things other than a specific place and time, for example biographies, political history, women’s history, economic history, etc.

We hope you can now more easily use the 1000+ books recommended by the flairs of AskHistorians!

#Questions?

#Do I need a Goodreads account to use this list?

Nope, our shelves are set to public. If you have an account you will have a slightly better experience though, and of course then you can build your own book lists, and friend us!

#How do find books about a certain subject?

Subject tags are called “shelves” on Goodreads, so just browse our shelves! (full list of shelves is on the left)

#How do I search this book list?

Use the small search bar on our shelves page, just be sure not to use the big search bar by the Goodreads logo. Big search bar searches the entire Goodreads catalog, little search bar searches just our books.

#Can I find books that have been shelved under two subjects, like “Middle Ages” and “Economic History?”

Yes, you can do this, but Goodreads really doesn’t make it obvious:

1. Click on your first shelf.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the list of shelves. You will see tiny grey text saying “select multiple.” Click it.
3. Plus signs appear by the shelves. Click the plus on your second shelf of choice. Or third and fourth!
4. Books are filtered to your individual requirements.

#Okay I found a book, how do I buy it or get it from the library?

Goodreads makes both of these 1 or 2 click actions, no more copying and pasting to search!

On a book’s specific record there are links to Amazon, Other booksellers, and then Libraries, which goes to Worldcat by default. If you have a Goodreads account you can actually customize these buttons to your preferred bookseller and even your local library catalogs. (And if you have the means, I highly recommend adding in the search buttons for your library, it’s so choice. I’m talking 5 clicks to put a book on your request list.)

#Does this mean you are deleting the wiki list?

Nope. We made a copy on Goodreads for people who asked for a searchable booklist, because this was the easiest way to do it.

#Are documentaries, databases, and all the other non-book things on the Booklist on here?

Unfortunately no, Goodreads only allows for books. Another reason not to retire the wiki list!

#Hey there’s no books about [my favorite thing]!

The Booklist is crowdsourced from the flairs, go sweetly ask your favorite subject expert to give it some books.

So I am making a browser-based homage to Age of Empires 2 - game trailer here - and I want for it to be quasi-historically accurate. As a setting, I want to go with the 10-15 centuries, primarily because that was the Feudal era and it falls in line with the theme of the game ("Feudal" Wars). You can view some of the artwork for the different civilizations on the subreddit (r/feudalwars).

I'm not exactly a history buff so I wanted to pick your brains as to what the setting of the game should be like. If you haven't played age of empires (what my game will be like), you essentially start out as a civilization of your choice and you can make buildings, armies with the artwork of the buildings/armies matching the style of the civilization. For example, here is our spanish barracks: http://i.imgur.com/DuA4eD2.png And here is our english barracks: http://i.imgur.com/s5t9AXj.png

One of the problems I'm confronted with is determining which civilizations the game should have. I want to start out with English and Spanish but Spain of course didn't exist from 10-15 and was more divided into kingdoms like Corsica and Leon (right?). I certainly wouldn't mind calling the civ Corsica Castile instead of Spanish and I could use the castilian coat of arms (since that's public domain) but is that historically accurate?

If you had to list the dominant united military powers from 10-15, what would they be? Again, I'm not looking for exact historical accuracy - I just want to portray a "rounded off" version of history. What civilizations would you put in the game and how would you name them? I'm looking for kingdom name and people name (e.g. England / English). I'm also looking to portray civs with distinct architectural styles. For example, 1 of the reasons we chose English and Spanish starting out was because of the distinct architectural styles of the two in the latter middle ages. I'm going to want to have middle eastern and far east civs (Japanese obviously) as well.

I'd appreciate any advice!

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Today:

Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Sunday Digest (formerly the Day of Reflection). Nobody can read all the questions and answers that are posted here, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.