A fun way to learn history…
Like many people, I enjoy reading about history, but I don’t get through many textbooks. It’s popular history books for me! So, in order to get a chronological history of the world, if a bit random, I’ve started collecting books that focus on just one year.
I figure that an entire book on the events of one year is going to be pretty thorough. If I read these, it will be looking at history through a bunch of snapshots in time.
(A corresponding collection which I’m starting to build, but not yet catalog, is a history of major cities. My theory is that if the history-by-year books are a perpendicular slice of time, then the history-by-city books are horizontal. It seems like viewing history through two perpendicular lenses could give me a good perspective. Some of these history-by-years turn out to be pretty limited in scope, especially the military ones, but it’s a good theory, at least!)
This is not a comprehensive bibliography, but rather a way for me to keep track of my own little section.
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69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors. Gwyn Morgan
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AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State. Charles Freeman
- The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman’s World. Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger
- The Year 1000. Henri Focillon.
- The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D. James Reston
- 1066: The Year of the Conquest. David Howarth
- 1215: The Year of Magna Carta. Danny Danziger
- Bannockburn 1314. Chris Brown
- 1421: The Year China Discovered America. Gavin Menzies [NEED ANOTHER]
- 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. Gavin Menzies [NEED ANOTHER]
- 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West. Roger Crowley
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Charles C. Mann
- 1492: The Decline of Medievalism and the Rise of the Modern Age. Barnet Litvinoff
- 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Charles C. Mann [NEED ANOTHER]
- 1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half. Stephen R. Bown
- A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. James Shapiro.
- 1603: The Death of Queen Elizabeth I, the Return of the Black Plague, the Rise of Shakespeare, Piracy, Witchcraft, and the Birth of the Stuart Era. Christopher Lee
- 1676: The End of American Independence. Stephen Webb.
- 1688: A Global History. John E. Wills, Jr.
- 1700: Scenes from London Life. Maureen Waller
- 1775: A Good Year for Revolution. Kevin Phillips
- 1776. David McCullough
- 1777: The Year of the Hangman. John S. Pancake
- 1787: The Grand Convention. Clinton Rossiter and Richard B. Morris
- 1788. Watkin Tench and Tim Flannery
- 1805: Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Destruction of the Third Coalition. Robert Goetz
- 1812: The War That Forged a Nation. Walter R. Borneman
- 1812: The Navy’s War. George C. Daughan
- The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History. William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman
- 1831: Year of Eclipse. Louis P. Masur
- The Year of Decision 1846. Bernard DeVoto [NEED ANOTHER]
- 1846: Portrait of the Nation. Margaret C. S. Christman
- 1863: The Rebirth of a Nation. Joseph E. Stevens
- The Year of the Century: 1876. Dee Brown
- 1877: Year of Violence. Robert V. Bruce
- 1898: Prelude to a Century. John A. Corry
- 1900. Rebecca West
- 1915: The Death of Innocence. Lyn MacDonald
- 1918: War and Peace. Gregor Dallas
- 1918: The Year or Victories. Martin Marix Evans
- Nineteen Nineteen. A.I. Hunsberger
- 1919: The Year Our World Began. William K. Klingaman
- 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents. David Pietrusza
- 1927: The Picture Story of a Wonderful Year. Carl H. Giles
- 1932: The Rise of Hitler and FDR–Two Tales of Politics, Betrayal, and Unlikely Destiny. David Pietrusza
- 1933. Philip Metcalfe
- 1939: A Retrospect Forty Years After. Roy Douglas
- 1940: Myth and Reality. Clive Ponting
- 1940. Laurence Thompson
- 1941: Our Lives in a World on the Edge. William K. Klingaman
- 1943:The Victory That Never Was. John Grigg
- 1945: The War That Never Ended. Gregor Dallas
- 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. Mark Kurlansky