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wormwood_pearl found a pile of books, mostly in good condition and some of them quite interesting, in a skip near my flat. I don't know why they'd been thrown out: Oxfam would have been glad of a few of them, I'm sure. Anyway, I read one called Busted, which was the memoirs of a Drugs Squad officer from the Seventies and early Eighties (interesting stuff), and now I've started reading the Pelican History of the World. It's a thousand-page job, written by an ex-Oxford History don in the mid-Seventies (EDIT: Amazon link). So far, I'm fifty pages in, and Jericho has just been founded (he starts with the extinction of the dinosaurs). The style's a bit dry and long-winded, but the material's interesting, and I'd like to know more about History.
But before I devote too much time to this, I want to ask the more historically-minded of you if it's worth doing at all. Has our understanding of world history changed so significantly since 1976 that the book's only of historical (ahem) interest? I've noticed a couple of things: for instance, he comments that most paleolithic hunter-gatherers would have been arthritic, rheumatic, have rotten teeth, and would have died before they were forty, whereas it was my understanding that hunter-gatherers were actually pretty healthy, at least compared to agriculturalists (who were, however, able to eat the hunter-gatherers' lunch because of the greater population density that their lifestyle supported). He also states that hunter-gatherers would have little time for leisure, which again is contrary to what I've heard.
["Historiography", in case you don't know, is the study of how history has been written down the ages. It's metahistory, but the subject predates the trend of attaching "meta" to everything to denote self-reference. It's a good word, I think :-)]
wormwood_pearl found a pile of books, mostly in good condition and some of them quite interesting, in a skip near my flat. I don't know why they'd been thrown out: Oxfam would have been glad of a few of them, I'm sure. Anyway, I read one called Busted, which was the memoirs of a Drugs Squad officer from the Seventies and early Eighties (interesting stuff), and now I've started reading the Pelican History of the World. It's a thousand-page job, written by an ex-Oxford History don in the mid-Seventies (EDIT: Amazon link). So far, I'm fifty pages in, and Jericho has just been founded (he starts with the extinction of the dinosaurs). The style's a bit dry and long-winded, but the material's interesting, and I'd like to know more about History.But before I devote too much time to this, I want to ask the more historically-minded of you if it's worth doing at all. Has our understanding of world history changed so significantly since 1976 that the book's only of historical (ahem) interest? I've noticed a couple of things: for instance, he comments that most paleolithic hunter-gatherers would have been arthritic, rheumatic, have rotten teeth, and would have died before they were forty, whereas it was my understanding that hunter-gatherers were actually pretty healthy, at least compared to agriculturalists (who were, however, able to eat the hunter-gatherers' lunch because of the greater population density that their lifestyle supported). He also states that hunter-gatherers would have little time for leisure, which again is contrary to what I've heard.
["Historiography", in case you don't know, is the study of how history has been written down the ages. It's metahistory, but the subject predates the trend of attaching "meta" to everything to denote self-reference. It's a good word, I think :-)]