I am a beginner and non-historian. I want to get a sense of world history. I was originally going to begin with Will Durant's "The Story of Civilization," but dropped it after learning that the series is considered more entertainment than scholarship.
My goal is to get a general sense of history and to draw sociological implications from it for the present day. What are some books/series/authors you recommend for this task?
I am hoping to get an array of specialists from every era (e.g. one historian of Ancient mesopotamia, one historian of Rome, etc.) each recommend no more than 2 books which they feel are comprehensive, and to have a list of under 50 books by which I might gain a solid background in world history.
That or if someone thinks there is a series already extant that would provide me with the foundation I desire, I'm open to that too.
Thank you for your contributions.
It's not perfect (nothing is), but one place to start could be the two-volume world history textbook The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History. It's written by a team of specialists, one of whom, Richard Bulliet, has an excellent series of lectures on YouTube and iTunes U from a class he taught accompanying the book. Bulliet is a specialist on Medieval Islam with an eye toward world-historical context, and taught at Columbia University before he retired. He has a lot of material available online which would be of interest to you.
My own field is Ottoman history, and there's really only one up-to-date single-volume history of the empire which can be recommended right now: Caroline Finkel's Osman's Dream (2005).