Whoever was downvoting is a silly billy, have you checked our book list? I'd recommend looking at the "Early Modern" and "Modern History" section of European history.

If you're at all interested in my field then I'd be more than happy to find some books to wet your appetite.

Happy Reading! :)

I don't know why I am getting downvoted, I am simply trying to educate myself and I thought the good people of /r/AskHistorians would be eager to help.

Judging by the time of your edit, the downvote(s) came very early on. Its an unfortunate fact of reddit that some users feel there to be incentive to downvote new submissions that are around the time of their own. This may or may not be the reason here, but you'll often notice many submission that get hit with a downvote quickly, for no apparent reason. People also just downvote questions that they aren't interested.

It is very unfortunate that people do, as we try to discourage downvoting questions here, and impress upon people that just because they don't find something interesting is no reason to do so.

A word of advice though, complaining about downvotes is a sure way to just get more, so I would suggest not mentioning the fact in the future if it happens and just rolling with it :-\