A favourite is a hard thing to choose, especially when there are a fair few gems in my area of research. Fortunately, if we are talking about documentaries, there are a few decent series which stand out (yes I'm bending the definition of "favourite" here but oh well). One in particular I can recommend more than the others however, so I'll do that first before getting onto my top 3 favourite books.

First up is Apocalypse World War 1*,* all 6 episodes are available to watch for free on Youtube, and it was one of the first good history documentary series I watched on television. It covers, through the use of excellent archive footage and primary sourcework, the causes and course of the First World War, from the pre-war situation in 1914 to the Armistice of 1918. Heavily dramatized of course, but it is unique in that it covers ALL of the major theaters of the war, with segments dedicated to the war in Africa, the Eastern Front, the Asian Front, and the Middle Eastern theater. For someone looking to get a glimpse of what that 'seminal' tragedy was like, and how the military aspect of the war unfolded, I can highly recommend this 2014 documentary series as a starting point.

Now onto the books then, and I shall shamelessly adapt some writing I did about them on previous threads asking for recommendations/good reads:

1. Ernst Gombrich's A Little History of the World: A bit old admittedly; 1936 when the first edition was published, though you can easily find newer ones with additional material by other historians included. This book was one of my first ones when I was starting out on history (and the name AskHistorians was about three years away from ever becoming a commonplace utterance of mine), but it is frankly an amazing work of story-telling which traces some of the general trends, civilisations, and progress that our societies have undergone in the past four millennia or so. I also rather like the minimalist design of the cover and the illustrations inside the work, so bonus points for aesthetic there. It's probably one of the few history books I could fall asleep reading, not because of how boring or argumentative it is, but simply by how it flows so well and reads like your old bedtime story (and since that story is based on true fact, all the better!). As another bonus point, Gombrich's work is very much a plausible work for younger audiences to get stuck into history with! The prose is simple, easy to follow, and reads very much like a bedtime story (except this bedtime story is based entirely on events from the beautiful, tragic, but always interesting past).
2. Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August: I might put forward the argument here that any student of the First World War should read this book, being one of, if not the most famous works on the origins and early weeks of the Great War. The prose here is a tad harder to parse admittedly, but once you do Tuchman's analysis of the weeks leading up to and following the "seminal tragedy" of June and July 1914 is sensational reading. Though fair warning: her historical narrative can be rather... judgemental at times, with unnecessary condescending remarks about figures and nation-systems being communicated. On the whole however, I found the book to be a great starting point, and it sparked a fair bit of my desire to specialise further in the "great power politics" of the First World War.
3. John Darwin's Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain: I picked up this book just a few months ago (February actually!) and it has earned its place as a favourite on my bookshelf. In just a few hundred pages of well-sources and highly engaging text, Darwin fleshes out some of the "truths" about the nature, rise, and fall of the British Empire which dominates a fair bit of "popular history" and the media. It is an indispensable bit of entry-writing on the Empire's formation, ruling, and development which reveals a fair bit about why the legacy of Britannia remains a constant topic of political importance in the 21st century.

Hope you found this interesting, and feel free to ask me any follow-up questions on any of the works mentioned here as well!

I study American History with interests in Indigenous history, rhetoric/performance, place-histories, and radical social movements. Here are a few of my favorites.

Some books with beautiful methodology behind them:

Kelly Lytle Hernández does an amazing cross-temporal look at incarceration in Los Angeles in City of Inmates.

Lisa Brooks' Our Beloved Kin is an astoundingly detailed and anti-colonial account of King Philip's War. Christine De Lucia's Memory Lands is an equally brilliant book on the subject, with a greater emphasis on place-history and reading landscapes. To complete a trifecta of New England Indigenous histories, check out Jean M. O'brien's Firsting and Lasting.

Some lighter books that I've just enjoyed:

William Loren Katz's Black Indians. There's plenty to critique with this book, but nevertheless an easy intro to Afro-Native studies.

Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. A highly readable overview of Native American history, with the added urgency of being written shortly before the explosion of Red Power/AIM activism.

Michael Katz's The Populist Persuasion. Traces populism as a discursive entity through American history. Along the way, gives some insight into the Jacksonian era, the People's Party, the labor movement, and more.