Hey all!
I've been absolutely fascinated by this time period and place since I listened to lectures about it on iTunes U from UC Berkeley. Since then I've watched The Great War series on Youtube, anything from Oversimplified and Extra History, and listened to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series on WWI a bunch of times. I'm currently reading the Guns of August (love it) and wanted to see if you could recommend some more resources to learn about the different powers and people of the times. Would prefer less dry and more narrative/people driven media, like Ken Burns docs, the PBS Empire series, and Robert Caro biographies.
Would love recommendations on: Maria Theresa, Habsburgs, Otto von Bismarck, Fredrick The Great, European powers leading up to the Napoleonic Wars and after, Carl von Clausewitz, Catherine The Great, World War I, 7 Years War, the French Revolution, etc.
Not as interested but still intrigued: Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars, British Monarchs (seen a ton of docs on these)
Greetings! Grand to hear that you're interested in that particular period of History, and what a well-written about period it is! For even more reading and watching recommendations, I would point you in the direction of the AskHistorians Booklist, where flairs and mods with much more expertise in their subject areas have laid out a plethora of books on all manner of subjects. In particular, you might find the following categories of book recommendations worth perusing:
Now, I will add a note of caution here with your boilerplate recap of what you have viewed and read so far. None of those Youtube Channels, the Dan Carlin Podcast, and The Guns of August are on the recommended reading/watching list of AskHistorians. I shall be first addressing why each of those sources is not ideal to be learning from, and then recommending some for my subject/research areas.
Criticisms and Cautionary Notes
Firstly, Oversimplified and Extra Credit. I shall assume that you are already aware of the fact that, somewhat by their nature and media type, Youtube Channels on "History" are hit-and-miss for the most part. Oversimplified quite literally acknowledges this limitation of its content with its name, and Extra Credit has been known to directly plagiarise from less than accurate or up-to-date sources for its videos (not to mention omit or completely misconstrue information in their narratives. r/badhistory has plenty of writeups on Extra Credit in particular, but since OP mentioned World War I later on this post regarding their series on the July Crisis may be of some interest.
Secondly, the Dan Carlin Podcast. Whilst I have never actually listened to any of the podcast episodes, we do get plenty of questions either based on information within a series there or just generally asking how Carlin's work stacks up against the actual historiography. Most recently, several flairs dissected the omissions and poor narratives of some of his podcast episodes here, and u/IlluminatiRex wrote a particularly alarming deep-dive on Carlin's "genocide Olympics" with his Blueprint for Armageddon series on badhistory here. Further factual errors with that series are also analyzed and highlighted in this thread.
I want to stress here that these errors should by no means make you completely stop listening to the podcast or listen to the videos, but one should always be wary of such "pop-history" sources in light of the fact that they are aimed at being relatively digestible and therefore (perhaps unknowingly for the audience) are "simplified" to varying degrees.
Thirdly, and this is the one I have particular connections with, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. As an exciting literary work on the outbreak of the First World War, it certainly represents a milestone of sorts. However, as a reputable secondary source on the outbreak of the conflict, it's pretty poor. Even when it was very popular in the 1960s, there were a fair few historians who criticized its content and lack of balanced analysis. IlluminatiRex has compiled a much more thorough collection of criticisms on this badhistory post on The Guns of August. In sum, Guns of August represents an outdated and fairly reductionist narrative on how the First World War broke out in 1914, and there's plenty of much more up to date (and more in-depth) secondary sources which I shall be recommending here shortly. Ulrich Trumpener, a noted historian on the matter wrote of Tuchman's work in 1963 that:
"The book’s usefulness is further impaired by a blatantly one-sided treatment of Imperial Germany. Authentic information about its faults and misdeeds is mixed in- discriminately with half-truths, innuendoes, and absurd generalizations, transforming the Germans of 1914 into a nation of barbarians. In Mrs. Tuchman's pages, the German people are invariably unpleasant, hysterical, or outright brutish (the garbling of evidence is particularly noticeable here), and the armies, marching like "predatory ants" across Belgium (p. 213), soon reveal the "beast beneath the German skin" (p. 314).
[…]The story of 1914 becomes even more lop-sided as a result of Mrs. Tuchman's decision to pay only fleeting attention to the Dual Monarchy and Serbia. To this reviewer it is not at all clear how the affairs of these two countries-and Balkan problems in general divide themselves "naturally" from the rest of the war (p. viii) […] Mrs. Tuchman's personality profiles of the leading figures on both sides are skilfully written, though some are debatable (e.g., that of Sir John French) and a few plainly misleading (e.g., that of Admiral G. A. von Müller)."
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