2 requests

[Zee.]

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

[Drkshadow03]

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 (http://www.amazon.com/Defying-Hitler-Memoir-Sebastian-Haffner/dp/B0001LUH1U/ref=tag_stp_st_edpp_url).

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 How far back and what cultures should these historical documents be from?

[Mathor]

The Social Contract Or Principals of Political Right by Jean Jacques Rousseau

[Zee.]

I'd recommend Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner (http://www.amazon.com/Defying-Hitler-Memoir-Sebastian-Haffner/dp/B0001LUH1U/ref=tag_stp_st_edpp_url).

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 How far back and what cultures should these historical documents be from?


^ hmm, i've read both. I know I said pamphlets but i'm leaning towards books.

[AmericanEagle]

The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong
The Art of War - Sun Tzu

[Barbarous]

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.

[JacobF]

The History by Herodotus.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.

Essays by J.S. Mill.

Capital by Karl Marx.

[higley]

Machiavelli's The Prince, and anything by Thomas Paine but most notably Common Sense.

[stlukesguild]

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.

[Mathor]

Letter From Birmingham Jail - Martin Luther King Jr

http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html

[islandclimber]

a little new perhaps :P

but...

Our Word is Our Weapon Subcomandante Marcos

[mortalterror]

i'm looking for a list of very important historical books...
Just a few. Ask mortalterror for some input of the Roman historians.

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

[Zee.]

I have compiled a list of everything you all have mentioned and will slowly but surely, get through them all :)

[Pecksie]

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.

[prendrelemick]

'Good bye to all that'. Robert Graves' memoirs. I think one of the best accounts of the first world war from the trenches.

[JuniperWoolf]

A Room of One's Own has done a lot for feminism.

[JBI]

A Room of One's Own has done a lot for feminism.

As has The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

And The Laugh of the Medusa by Helene Cixous, amongst other great texts.

[Nightshade]

Was I have a Dream a book then? I thought that was just ( well not just but you know what I mean) a speech.
Lima have a look a the penguin great ideas books http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/greatideas/index_1.html