I was a good student growing up, but history was never my best subject. I memorized (and subsequently forgot) my way through history classes in high school and managed to avoid the subject in college, because I worried that it would pull down my GPA. The joke is on me, because now I’m interested in history without a survey-level knowledge of the subject matter.

There are so many lacunae in my knowledge, and I'd appreciate your book recommendations to fill them. I'm working on a DIY history education by reading broadly in history, but I don't have enough context to know which events I should start with. What topics you would expect an undergraduate history to student to know about, before they enrolled in an upper-division course? Additionally, I’d love to know the book you’d most recommend as background knowledge for each topic.

To give a sense of the type of book I’m after: I loved Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,” but I also found it a little difficult to get through. In contrast, I enjoyed the sweeping nature of Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” but felt that it didn’t go quite enough in-depth. "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" is squarely in the Goldilocks zone for me.