I just started Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Gleach dives into the specifics of the Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom, explains the cultural and historic background of tidewater Virginia to provide context to the events leading up to Jamestown's founding, as well as the resulting hostilities/trading/peace/eventual establishment of reservations after Bacon's Rebellion. Thus far, a very interesting read that I wish I had gotten to sooner.

Any good reading lists for seeing how views on specific World War II topics have changed over time?

I'm more interested in seeing a long, coherent look at a subject rather than an overview of the war, so it'd be preferable if the list focused on one topic (Late-war US submarine operations, 1941 in the USSR, Japanese early war planning, etc.)

Looking for something like this:

• Books representative of immediate post-war thought

• Books interacting with decolonization, clean Wehrmacht debates, newly available USSR records, etc.

• Books with the most recent historiography

I have a bunch of old (1950s and 1960s) books for the US and Nazi Germany, but I want to supplement them with a good understanding of how new evidence, source criticism, and reasoning have changed views since the war ended.

I read A Short History of England by Simon Jenkins. I've become suspicious of history books written by non-historians – and especially by journalists – but my father had it lying around and let me borrow it, so I thought, why the hell not.

Quick review: There's a huge contrast between the first and second half of the book. Up to and including the reign of Queen Anne, the book focuses almost exclusively on court politics. This doesn't only gloss over a lot of interesting social and cultural developments, it also makes for very annoying reading: in the rapid-fire parade of kings, chancellors and bishops, I often found myself having to backtrack a few pages – 'wait, who was this Suffolk guy again?'

Then once we get to the Hanoverian dynasty, the scope of the book suddenly broadens – but according to Jenkins, that's mostly because of the new monarchs' personal temperament:

The Georges cared chiefly for their mistresses and their cards, and let the body politic breathe and mature. As a result, statesmen no longer danced attendance on kings but lived as separate political personalities in their own right, tossed back and forth by parties, opinions, voters and economic forces, all of which acquired a new significance.

Right.

Still, the change in scope is welcome; after this point, especially when we get to the 19th and 20th century, the book is a lot more interesting. Changes in technology, social stratification, and mentality finally get the attention they deserve, rather than being treated as an unimportant sideshow to the bickering Richards, Edwards and Henries. I particularly liked observations such as this one, in the chapter about World War II:

Civil servants struggled to run what amounted to a siege economy. Inevitably they became figures of ridicule... The comedy radio show It's That Man Again lampooned an official whose catch-line was, 'I've hundreds of irritating restrictions to impose on you.' He was one wartime character who never demobilised.

Or, in the chapter about the welfare state:

...the cabinet opted for a centralised health service. Bevan said that 'if a bedpan lands on the floor in the hospital in Tredegar, it should be clanging in Whitehall.' This principle gave birth to a national health service that rivalled the Red Army in size. The age had come to pass where 'the gentleman in Whitehall knows best.' The trouble with the NHS over the next half century was that the gentleman kept changing his mind.

If Jenkins had taken a similar approach throughout the book, instead of describing everything before 1714 as more or less a royal chronicle, A Short History of England would have been an excellent and highly recommendable book. As it stands, it isn't.

What is an excellent and highly recommendable book is Preußen ohne Legende by Sebastian Haffner. I'm a big fan of Haffner in general, but if there's one weakness to the two other books of his I've read – Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19 and Von Bismarck zu Hitler: Ein Rückblick – it's that they're written a bit too much like a chess match report, analysing history in terms of the motives and calculations of a handful of highly rational "players". (Von Bismarck zu Hitler, which purports to be a history of Germany from 1871 through 1945, heavily focuses on German foreign policy in most chapters.)

Preußen ohne Legende doesn't have this problem. In his trademark style – cold logic interspersed with the occasional moral judgment or quasi-philosophical observation, and always skeptical, as if addressing a naïve reader who needs to be cured of his illusions – Haffner describes and analyses the history of Prussia. He investigates how the social, cultural and economic structures typical of Prussia arose, and why they succeeded or failed. He explains why Prussia could rise to prominence, and why what looked like its ultimate victory – the unification of Germany in 1871 – was actually the beginning of the end. Along the way, he judges the accomplishments of figures like Frederick the Great, Neithardt von Gneisenau and Otto von Bismarck, and (true to the book's title) does away with many of the positive and negative "legends" that surround Prussia. Engagingly written, broad in scope, and full of provocative but always solidly argued analysis, Preußen ohne Legende is a must-read for anyone interested in Prussia.

Now for recommendation requests! I have a ton of them:

• Any good books on the history of Italy by Italian historians, that have been translated into – or originally written in – English or German (or, as a last resort, French)? I'm particularly interested in the Italian Renaissance and the Risorgimento.
• Same question for Spanish historians on Spain, Danish historians on Denmark, Swedish historians on Sweden, and Russian historians on Romanov-era Russia.
• Books that examine the origins of the feudal system. I've heard a bunch of different explanations, from "it evolved out of a holdover from Roman times" to "it arose naturally from the need for heavily-armed cavalry warriors" to "Charles Martel or Charlemagne personally invented it because their realm was too big to govern centrally," and I have no idea what to believe. Some serious analysis on this topic would be very welcome.
• Books on the Industrial Revolution in Europe, particularly in Britain. Normally I'm not a fan of the Annales School approach, but in this case a strong statistical focus would be good, in order to get a good idea of how widespread certain developments actually were at a given point in time.

And finally, a more general question: how bad is it to read very old books? In my quest for knowledge I've occasionally come across books from before WWII, such as Jacques Bainville's Histoire de France (1924). Will reading such books give me a wrong or distorted view of history? Are there rules of thumb for this ("books from before 19XX will probably get a lot wrong") or is it more of a case-by-case thing?

Does anyone recommend any books on China's modern warlord period?

I'm reading Exploraciones Arqueológicas en Tingambato, Michoacán by Ramán Piña Chan. Tingambato is a Late Classic/Epiclassic site that is unique in that it has talud tablero architecture, one of the few sites in West Mexico to have "Central Mexican" connections (I think these connections are related to the migrations out of the Bajio during the same time. So less Teotihuacan and more Teotihuacan influenced Chichimec). The site is also unique in that it has chambered tombs built with slabs of sandstone. These tombs are unrelated to the earlier shaft tombs found further north.

Just finished Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts. I enjoyed the book, and thought it gave an impartial biography of 'le petite corporal.'

The book did not address much about the French Revolution as it only pertained mainly about Napoleon.

I am interested in picking up a book on the French Revolution and was wondering what users thought was the go to book about it?