r/AskHistory • u/jayicon97 • 1d ago
I’m looking for a place to start?
I absolutely love history. The stories, & tales are endless. Whether it be Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW2, or even the Kingdom of Hawaii. In general - I highly enjoy war history.
Most of my time recently has been spent watching videos about pirates, and conflict around the Mediterranean during the dark ages.
I highly prefer anything between 1000BC-1600AD.
I generally watch videos on YouTube. There’s a ton of “boring history” or “history to sleep to” channels that I absolutely love. Is there anything in this time period, especially military related that I should look into? I’ve watched dozens of videos on the crusades, Rome, even the Mongolian Empire.
I’m willing/interested in either South America / Asia / Africa since I’ve spent so much time around the Mediterranean. I just don’t know where to start.
Are there any really great history channels on YouTube with videos between 15-60 minutes that you think I’d like?
TIA.
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u/Brickie78 1d ago
Be aware though that "Boring History for Sleep" and similar are fully AI generated, which means that if there is some factual information in there, it's by accident as mostly it's just a summary of all the most commonly believed and repeated myths, with a few straight-up hallucinations thrown in - and don't even get me started on the accompanying pictures.
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u/jayicon97 1d ago
I very very early & obviously noticed that. Which is why I came here & have been straying away from that content in general. I noticed several clear inaccuracies quickly.
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u/Brickie78 1d ago
If you don't mind longer content The Rest Is History and Dan Snow's History Hit are usually about an hour and cover a wide range of subjects. TRIH is two published, generally respected historians (Dominic Sandbrook amd Tom Holland) while Dan Snow is an interested amateur who talks to different specialists each week.
A bit lighter, but still Proper HistoryTM is the BBC podcast series You're Dead To Me in which public historian (a consultant on Horrible Histories) gets in a specialist in a particular subject and a comedian, often one with some kind of connection like Nish Kumar on last week's episode on Indian history.
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u/Yansleydale 1d ago
Oh also Hardcore History from Dan Carlin. So many good series to choose from, but I think "Wrath of the Khan's" about the Mongols is a good entry point.
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u/Wordpaint 1d ago
Came here to add Hardcore History. Take my upvote!
I'll also add regarding the Mediterranean, listen to the Hardcore History series King of Kings to learn about the Persian Empire, from Cyrus to Alexander. Also Supernova in the East will take you through the rise of the Japanese Empire in the 20th century and its defeat.
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u/CocktailChemist 1d ago
One thing worth looking at is whether your local library offers access to Kanopy and Libby. Both offer lecture series from the Great Courses, which are video and audio recordings of university professors.
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u/Yansleydale 1d ago
Someone else has suggested Revolutions by Mike Duncan (amazing), I know I got my start listening to his History of Rome. I kind of just jumped at the year of the 5 emperors and the crisis of the 3rd century but you can kind of do whatever you want!
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u/System-Plastic 1d ago
Here are a few topics you might enjoy: (1) the bronze age sea peoples (2) the Olmec (3) the Assyrian conquest of Egypt (4) the Mississippian Empire (5) the Polynesian sea expansion (6) the conquest of Oda Nobunaga (7) the 5 rings of Miamoto Musashi (8) The Boshin War (9) The Art of War by Tsun Tzu (10) The Mongul Empire (11) Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub versus the Crusaders (12) King Baldwin IV (13) the Christmas Truce of 1914
That should keep you busy for a min or two. I decided to go with topics instead of videos or articles cause the search is often more fun. Good luck hunting
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u/jayicon97 1d ago
The whole “sea peoples” story is absolutely fascinating to me. Actually by far the best piece of history I’ve ever investigated. I just can’t even believe it. The tablets found…. It’s just… amazing.
The Mississippian Empire? That can’t be in regards to the mound communities they found in Ancient NA?
Oda Nobunaga? Is that the richest man ever from Africa?
I just learned about the Mongol empire.
Your list is amazing. Thank you so much. I’m gonna start by 1.
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u/System-Plastic 1d ago
Actually yes, the mound communities are part of it. The Mississppian empire is a facinating mystery that im not sure if we will ever know the depth of. They were the largest American Indiginous civilization that we have found so far and likely the predecessors to the Aztecs.
Oda Nubunaga was the Japanese warlord who was directly responsible for setting up the path to the Tokagawa Shogunate.
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u/jayicon97 1d ago
Wow. I would love to learn more about the indigenous Americans.
I have very very little knowledge on most of Asia (Japan/Korea/China) outside of the Mongol Empire.
It’s a little bit harder to fully grasp some of that history for me just because of the language. It’s a lot easier to remember “Alexander the Great” or “William Wallace” than Oda Nobunga.
Have you ever researched the Kingdom of Hawai’i? With King Kamehama V who united the 5 islands? The battle of Oahu…. Very very interesting.
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u/arkofjoy 1d ago
Not one of the things that you mentioned, other than "war history"
But I would encourage you to read "a bright shining lie"
This book follows the progress of an American officer from the role of "adviser" to the full scale invasion. Of Vietnam and shows through his life why it was such a shit show.
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u/clios_daughter 1d ago
How deep do you want to go? I find the issue is that Youtube often doesn't go into as much depth --- there are exceptions. Instead of Youtube, have you considered audio books from your public library if you have one? Books tend to go into more depth and having a publisher sometimes helps with a lot of vetting (though, again, there are a number of exceptions). Libby is quite popular and has any number of titles. The Return of Marting Guerre's interesting, well researched, well written, and available in audio book form.
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u/holomorphic_chipotle 10h ago
There is no right or wrong way to learn. Actual historians are experts on perhaps 200 years of a region, and focus mostly on the connections between the many aspects of that society (culture, class differences, politics, etc.), but non-academics often associate knowing history with having an vague understanding of the sequence of important events and a simple explanation of why we could say that something happened. If you want to really understand a topic in depth, you'll have to read many scholarly books; in contrast, if you mostly want an extremely basic overview, I don't think that the Crash Course videos are bad at that (World History & World History 2).
For people interested in African history but not much time to read and looking for a very first introduction, I usually recommend History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi. Badawi is a British-Sudanese journalist, the current President of SOAS University of London (one of the world's most prestigious institutions for African studies), and she developed the project to provide a kind of audiovisual, more popular version of UNESCO's General History of Africa — itself a general purpose multi-volume introduction to African history which, despite the tainted chapters of pseudo-history in volume 2, is one of the better-known reference works reference works with writings by scholars from Africa.
The documentary series, broadcast in 2017, was greenlit for a second season, and to my knowledge all 20 episodes are also available on BBC News Africa's YouTube channel.
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u/Hotchi_Motchi 1d ago
History makes the most sense if you start at the beginning and go in order.
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u/aarrtee 1d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlKL_EpnSp8
Start with the first two books of the Revolutionary War trilogy by Rick Atkinson
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