I was watching Valkyrie last night (bad movie) and knowing that it is based on a true story got me interested in the story behind it, and other like stories. I was wondering if anyone knew any good, true accounts of someone's experience through such an important historical event. Memoirs, if you will.
Second,
i'm looking for a list of very important historical books + pamphlets.
e.g Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto etc,
Suggestions would be wonderful, thank you
I'd recommend Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner.Originally Posted by limajean
As for your second: would The Declaration of Independence and Constitution count in that list? I'm trying to get a feel for what you are looking for. How far back and what cultures should these historical documents be from?
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The Social Contract Or Principals of Political Right by Jean Jacques Rousseau
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^ hmm, i've read both. I know I said pamphlets but i'm leaning towards books.
The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
this may be a bit out there, but check out Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel had this huge impact on Marx, after all.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
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The History by Herodotus.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.
Essays by J.S. Mill.
Capital by Karl Marx.
Machiavelli's The Prince, and anything by Thomas Paine but most notably Common Sense.
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i'm looking for a list of very important historical books...
Vasari- The Lives of the Artists
Thucydides- The Peloponnesian War
Plato- The Republic
de Tocqueville- Democracy in America
Emerson- Essays
Motaigne- Essays
Bernard Berenson- The Italian Painters of the Renaissance
John Ruskin- The Stones of Venice, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Modern Painters
Sir Francis Bacon- The New Atlantis, Essays
Sir Thomas More- Utopia
Desiderius Erasmus- In Praise of Folly
Lucius Annaeus Seneca- Dialogs/Essays
Edmund Burke- A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Voltaire- Candide, Philosophical Letters on the English, Essays
Thomas Jefferson, etc...-The Declaration of Independence
Mary Wollstonecraft- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Abraham Lincoln- Gettysburg Address
Martin Luther- To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian
Martin Luther King- I Have a Dream
John Milton- Areopagitica
Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine)- City of God, Confessions
Thomas Hobbes- Leviathan
Just a few. Ask mortalterror for some input of the Roman historians.
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I'm losing all those stupid games
That I swore I'd never play
a little new perhaps :P
but...
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Herodotus- Histories
Thucydides- History of the Pelopponesian War
Xenophon- Hellenica, Anabasis
Polybius- The Histories
Caesar- Commentaries
Sallust-The Jugurthine War
Livy- The Early History of Rome, The War Against Hannibal
Dionysius of Halicarnassus- Roman Antiquities
Tacitus-Annals, Histories
Plutarch- Parallel Lives
Josephus- The Jewish War
Suetonius- Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Arrian- Anabasis of Alexander
Appian- The Civil Wars
Cassius Dio- Roman History
Ammianus Marcellinus- Res Gestae
Procopius- The Secret History
Edward Gibbon- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Last edited by mortalterror; 07-18-2009 at 09:01 AM.
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I have compiled a list of everything you all have mentioned and will slowly but surely, get through them all
If you're interested in Count Stauffenberg, there's Paul West's harrowing book 'The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg'. The story is told in the voice of the Count. It's not a memoir, or even your typical history book --- West's prose is highly idiosyncratic, very personal, and sometimes reads like poetry --- but it sticks to the facts and gives them a deeply human dimension. I highly recommend it.
'Good bye to all that'. Robert Graves' memoirs. I think one of the best accounts of the first world war from the trenches.
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