Sounds like you are looking for social or cultural histories— maybe even a really good microhistoria, a sort of history that focuses on small events to explore what society (social practices and structures) were like. Or perhaps Ethnographic History would hit the spot.

To one extent or another, these different approaches borrow from the insights of Braudel and the Long durée, but typically do so in smaller time frames.

A few historians to look for that immediately come to mind would be Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darton, Carlo Ginsburg, Greg Dening. Most of the work produced by this group is fairly old as academic history goes— but has remained influential as an approach to writing history, even if their particular approaches social/cultural/micro/enthnographic have fallen out of favor (or come back into favor or arrived for the first time) in different fields of history.

Because I enjoy Medieval and Renaissance history the most and am not an academic, I found that the books A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England and then A Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England to be excellent for providing a setting for our historical thinking and learning. They are not written to an academic audience, but definitely seek to address some of the concerns you have here.

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London, 1900 is super fun and well researched and takes a single year in London. As an earlier writer said, this can be social, cultural or micro history. There is also John Arnold's History: a short introduction, which has a great chapter on the eighteenth century cat massacre in Paris, explaining how historians try to do what you describe. The past is a foreign country- how can we understand it? Basically loads of historians do this. Most academic history is less interested in simple dates. If you post another question asking about a specific time or event, you can get something tailored for your particular interests.

Yup, it sounds like you're after what we typically call social or cultural histories. I'm certainly not the right person to recommend works on the 19th century, but moving a bit earlier, Emma Rothschild's Inner Life of Empires explores one family's experience of the British Empire in the 1700s. For the Reformation, Eamon Duffy's The Voices of Morebath looks at the experience of a single parish in southwest England. Regarding the French Revolution, I'd point you to to Laurent Dubois's A Colony of Citizens giving an oblique take on this event from a particularly Haitian perspective.

There's lots of other great works out there that also fit the bill, and I'd like to highlight a few of my favorites. The classic example from medieval studies is Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre. You might also enjoy reading about the melting pot that was medieval Spain in María Rosa Menocal's Ornament of the World. Moving into the slightly more recent past, I'd strongly recommend John Putnam Demos's The Unredeemed Captive, about a Puritan girl taken captive by Indians who refuses to come home. Alternatively, you can dig into Puritans in James and Patricia Deetz's The Times of their Lives. I'm also a huge fan of Robert W. Harms's The Diligent, which offers a sensitive and harrowing take on the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade.

As /u/b1uepenguin mentions, what you want is often the explicit goal of social and cultural history.

Now, what’s the difference between the two, social history and cultural history? I think the best explanation is probably the chapter “The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian” chapter in William Sewell’s Logics of History. Sewell is one of the best known historians of 18th- and 19th-century France, and was really at the forefront of both movements as they took over the historical field, so he’s in good position to tell the history of both as he tells his own professional history.

Social history was originally a Post-War development that aimed to move professional history beyond the “names and dates” style history that’s often focused on things like military and politics. It was not the first such movement within professional history (which really probably should only be dated to about the 19th century or so, especially people like Leopold von Ranke who encouraged historians to go “back to the archives” in a way that was pathbreaking for the time). Important earlier movements include the Annales School, which aimed for “histories of the longue durée” covering huge areas, such as Fernand Braudel’s 1949 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II which aimed to cover slow changes in Mediterranean trade and culture over centuries. Early Marxist histories (Friedrich Engels himself wrote the first real Marxist history, the Peasant War in Germany, in 1870) were also an attempt to get away from names and dates.

The early social historians sought to combine influences from all three (a strong archive-based empiricism, a willingness to look at new subjects and time-scales, an emphasis on the common) to create a new kind of history. Their watchword was “history from below”. Rather than kings and courts looking down, these historians wanted to start with the most basic and work their way up to a picture of the world as it was.

The thing is: there is some reason why this history hadn’t been written before. Social history is hard. The historical record is spotty. It often says very little about anyone, especially very little about common people. One of my favorite answers that I’ve written on this subreddit is what we know about James, the person who lead the early Christian Church directly after Jesus. We know more about James than all but about half a dozen to a dozen Jews of his era, and we have so many unanswerable questions about who is.

The social historians developed a strategy of not focusing on individuals but focusing on types of people. One well known strategy they used was prosopography, which “is an investigation of the common characteristics of a historical group, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable, by means of a collective study of their lives”. You might not be able to say much about one dockworker in 19th century Marseille, but maybe you can gather together a lot of information about workers in general in Marseille in the 19th century (as Sewell did) from things like census lists, court records, property cadasters, wills, newspaper notices, union petitions, trial records, and so forth and get a picture of the city at the time. You my know little more than someone’s name, age, residence, and occupation, but if you are talented enough you can string hundreds of such stingy records into a narrative. You have very little information on each person, but you have a lot of it.

Notice that the title of Sewell’s essay is confessions of a former quantitative historian. This first generation of social historians was heavily quantitative. This was likely partially a Marxist Influence (after all, Marxism was supposed to be Scientific), but it was also just a matter of the records available. When you have such sparse data on any one individual, you often just have to end up counting things. Now, this first generation of social historians wasn’t necessarily quantitative. Perhaps the best known work from this period, E. P. Thompson’s 1963 The Making of the English Working Class, is qualitative and involves very little counting, but instead tells the story of the emergence of self-conscious urban working class by relying on court records and ballads and pamphlets and all sorts of other little scraps sewn together. It’s still very readable today.

For more quantitative approaches, see this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Quantitative History Makes a Comeback”. It name drops one of the most famous works of quantitative history, 1974’s Time on the Cross, a quantitative, economic history of American slavery on the eve of the Civil War. For a good discussion of that, see here.

As Sewell describes, this mostly quantitative social history ends up being somewhat disappointing. It successfully opened up massive new areas of history, but using its methods you can only answer certain types of questions. It was good at dealing with economic questions, questions of class and mobility, but much worse at dealing with questions of meaning. While sociology was the hot social science in the 1960’s, anthropology had become the hot social science of the 1970’s. Clifford Geertz in particular was hugely influential on other fields. He insisted that interpretation, rather than quantification, was where the future lay. He wanted “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

You can’t really get much meaning from a census record giving name, age, address, and occupation. Culture history (culture is very consciously taken from anthropology) was this attempt to get at questions of meaning. Rather than census records, you looked to art, you looked to novels, you looked to letters, and above all you looked towards newspapers. You end up having more information about fewer people. The focus shifts: your Marseille dockworker was not writing in newspaper. The focus in social history is typically squarely on the working class, but in culture history (by necessity of the sources often) you tend to drift up to the middle classes. They’re the ones leaving records of how they thought and felt, what things meant to them. After his book on the working classes of Marseille, Sewell wrote a book about A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and "What Is the Third Estate?" which carefully looked at language, and rhetoric, and above all meaning in the French Revolution. As a good sociologists, I tend to like pure cultural histories less (they are satisfying for meaning, but I find some of them unsatisfying based on the question of “well, how many people did this apply to?”), but many people love them because of much they can get at what was important to people and how they thought in bygone ages.

After the 1970’s, after the initial revolutionary thrust of both movements, you tend to see few people identifying purely as one movement or the other. Most of my favorite askhistorians writers would probably call themselves “a social and cultural historians of ____”. They end up using methods of both.

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There's a series of books which are sort of like Lonely Planet guides to historical cities. One of them, for example, is Shakespeare's London on 5 Groats a Day There's also one on Ancient Athens, Ancient Rome, and Medieval Florence, off the top of my head. The books describe places to go (and how to get there), where to stay, what to eat, what to wear, various forms of entertainment, etc. You get a good overview of daily life in that place in that period.

Ian Mortimer's Time Traveler's Guide series, as mentioned by others, is also really good.

Lastly, rather than a book about an event, I prefer to read biographies, as they, by necessity, deal more with the human side of things. A summing-up of dates and places tends to blend together in my head eventually. So for example, when I wanted to learn more about the American Revolution, I read biographies of various Founding Fathers. I found the French Revolution much more accessible through Marie Antoinette and Joséphine de Beauharnais (Napoleon's first wife). For the Russian Revolution (... I swear I don't only read books on revolutions!) I read Robert Massie's 'Nicholas and Alexandra', and a biography of their four daughters by Helen Rappaport. I have a preference for biographies of women, they tend to be more about daily life stuff, but that's just my thing.

Ooh ooh you'll love "London labour and the London poor"by Henry Mayhew. Mayhew wanted to document what life was like for the working classes in a way which was accessible to the wealthier set and would hopefully inspire them to be more charitable. He basically asked a lot of poor people what their lives were like. The result is a really easy read, and Mayhew did a great job of writing in the voice of his interviewees. There are parts of the book which are pages of boring export figures and lists of how much different things cost, I just skipped those because I don't really need to know the finer points of how merchants were taxed.

The book is more recent than your examples but it's great for finding out what life was like.

One book: Montaillou- by Emmanuel Le Roy Laudure

This book is wonderful. It analyzes the village of Montaillou in great detail over a thirty-year period from 1294 to 1324. The daily routines of the 250 or so inhabitants are recorded through inquisitions involving long interviews with the locals.

Johan Huizinga 'The Autumn of the Middle Ages' is indeed a classic and a very good reed. I found Philipp Blom 'The Vertigo years. Change and Culture in the West 1900-1914' to be very good as well.

This honestly sounds to me like you are reading outdated books at a fairly basic level. Where are you finding your literature? Most academic works written in the past century - or at least the past 50 years - don't just list events without any context. Historians these day are all very much engaged to the how and the why, not just to the when. This often means that their articles cross borders between the artificial subsets of history such as social, diplomatic or cultural history. While different historians still use various methods and angles or have their own focus, they will often explore diverging subsets that add important context.

So my advice would be to look for more academic works or at least works connected to academia in some way. I'd suggest visiting a specialized bookstore or a library attached to a University where they teach history. You can also try to find access to an online database, but most of those are behind a paywall unless you are affiliated with a University with a subscription to that specific database. There might also be some suggestions available on this subreddit regarding books on a specific topic, those should be available online.

It's a common misconception amongst the general public that history is all about remembering dates and names. It's happened quite a few times that when I mention that I'm a historian, people react by stating how dull it must be to remember all those dates and names. I'm actually very bad with dates and names, unless I've done research on the subject. The reality is that history is all about discerning patterns in order to fit the pieces all together and at least try to understand a past historical reality while being constantly aware that we can't fully understand it.

I'd give this book a read. You can get it used for, like, four bucks. The Social Dimension of Western Civilization

It was a large part of my Western Civ 101 curriculum in college.

Not related to your subject matter, but "Pompeii" by Mary Beard gives an excellent account of daily life across the whole spectrum of Pompeian society.

To a lesser extent, her other book "SPQR" does as well, but the latter isn't exclusively about day-to-day life.

"At home" is a book by Bill Bryson where he briefly (well brief by some standards) goes into each room of the typical house and provides insight as to why it exists and how it came about. It's rimarily framed from an English and American perspective. It's also very easy to read and has provides great insight to the various bits of life that history books usually don't have the time or space to go into. Oh man, laundry was absolutely terrible in the 1700's. I'd highly recommend this as a good starting point, as it's written for a more mainstream audience and doesn't go too in depth but provides a great survey.

There's a ton of great suggestions here. I would also recommended the Diary of Samuel Pepys. It's the diary by a mid/ high ranking bureaucrat in 1660s London.

Not a common man as such, and it naturally focuses on the life of just one guy, but it's well written, informative, relatable (he's a very flawed guy) and quite funny at times.

It's also available for free online at https://www.pepysdiary.com

I don't know a lot about history (compared to standard posters here, anyways), just going to preface with that, but Civilization before Greece and Rome by H.W.F. Saggs is a really interesting overview of different domains of life (from economic to social to intellectual) in the Bronze Age middle east. It's not exactly a travelogue sort of thing, but it definitely puts its focus on how things were done versus what was done. Chapters cover things like medicine, law, mathematics, writing, metalworking, etc. So the shift is on how people treated and engaged in different spheres of life in different regions at this time period.

I really enjoyed it, and I hope you would to.

Here's a couple social histories I could recommend:

Fire from Heaven by David Underdown was a great description of life in Dorchester during roughly 1610-1660s. Some of it's about the Civil War, of course, but much is about the everyday town life, the social programs of the civil/religious authorities, and the rise and decline of firebrand religiosity in the town. Quite readable, highly recommended.

In a similar note, I'm currently reading The English Medieval Town, by Colin Platt. It's more academic and focused on archaeology rather than town records, so there's fewer tidbits about people being accosted by the constables and more discussion of house construction and civic organization, but still quite interesting.

Try the podcasts Fall of Rome and Tides of History, researched and narrated by Patrick Wyman. He does a fairly good job of imaginative dramatic reconstruction interspersed with exposition from most current research. Together the podcasts cover the decline of Western Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the rise of European nation states.

This might not be EXACTLY what you're looking for but "The Last Full Measure: Death in Battle Through the Ages" by Michael Stephenson was a fantastic read. Focused mostly on first hand soldier accounts from wars all throughout history. A lot of references to journals and diaries, along with details on what a specific type of death might have been like to experience. My favorite example is what it might have felt like to be a part of a phalanx (obviously Stephenson puts it more elequently than this): you can't see shit, you're pressed up against a bunch of sweaty, terrified dudes, taking shouted directions from behind you, and the best way the enemy has to get you is to slash your ankles, so you're in constant fear of a person you can't see jabbing their sword at your legs. Lots of stuff like that with details on the soldier's perspectives.

The Age of Lincoln by Orville Vernon Burton might be exactly what you are looking for. It’s not a book about the president or the civil war. Instead it’s a history of the decades before and after the war that provides context to help understand the bigger events.

As an interesting follow-up, is anyone actually writing such a book right now about life in 2018 for future readers?

I had a series of books titled A History of Private Life which starts with pagan Rome and ends with mid 1900's.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1094

The series was very interesting and covered home life, sexual norms, legal/government, etc.

Tom Standage does a great job writing books which are thematically ordered, meaning he goes through history focusing on certain cultural phenomonam which influenced the time. His History of thr World in 6 Glasses" book is a great one. I'm currently reading his one on the first 2000 years of social media called Writing on the Wall.

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Links! - 6 Glasses

Social Media

Please see above for some great introductions to cultural history social history. Seriously, read them.

As for books about daily life, for Late Medieval England the go-to is The Ties That Bound by Barbara Hanawalt. It is an intimate and fairly comprehensive look at peasant life in the 1300's in England, covering housing, diet and work as well as family life, based, wait for it... Coroner's Inquest records. Yep, Hanawalt looks at what people were doing when they died to figure out what they were doing when they were alive. You can tell a lot about how houses were laid out by how people fall into fires, and a lot about recreation based on the stupid crap people were doing when they drowned. In addition to being a fascinating slice of life, the book is a great example of the historian's craft because of how well Hanawalt can analyze her sources.

You might enjoy The Italian Boy. It’s an analysis of a famous grave robbing case in 1930s London, but also a dive into what life was like for the poor of the time. Both the victim and the perpetrators came from the very lowest class and there’s a lot of very interesting information about the world in which they lived.

Oh man I have been looking for exactly this, myself. Actually to be more specific, maybe someone can help me as well. I would like a book about Renaissance to Thirty Years War era warfare. Not just movements of men and names of generals but exactly what war was like for the men on the ground in that period. anyone have a suggestion?

William Durant wrote a 9 or 10 volume History of Civilization.

If you like reading a lot, this will keep you busy for a few years.

In the fore-ward to the volume "The Age of Faith":

To. the. Reader. THIS. book aims to give as full and fair an account of medieval ... Crusades provides a measure of unity; and the tired reader, appalled by the length of the book, may find some consolation in learning that the original manuscript was half again longer than the present text.

While not directly trying to address your issue, I found Robert Caro's writings to offer outstanding overviews it.

Particularly, the first of his books on Lyndon Johnson — The Path to Power — gives an outstanding view of life in rural Texas before electrification.