Random Penseur is compiling a list of history books, historical novels, and biographies that meet two essential criteria: they are well written, and one does not need to have a lot of prior background in order to enjoy them. I thought I'd add to the list, and I invite readers to do the same in the comments.

History:
Kevin Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life: I picked this up in a used bookstore in London last year, and devoured it with great pleasure. It's a richly illustrated, totally unassuming oral history of Dublin tenement culture, one that contains numerous firsthand accounts of life in the early twentieth-century Dublin slums.

Tony Horwitz: Confederates in the Attic: excellent social history of contemporary Southern ways and means of remembering--or forgetting--the Confederacy.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory: riveting account of how World War I reshaped Western consciousness, with special emphasis on the life and literature of the trenches.

Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute: the little known and phenomenally interesting story of how it was that early nineteenth-century medical schools secured the right to dissect the dead.

Biography:
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: the mother of all literary biographies. Simply a stupendous piece of work.

Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde: some of Ellmann's claims and some of his research have been disputed, but this is nevertheless a magisterial and highly readable account of Wilde, one that quite movingly gets at the man behind the epigrammatic facade.

Leon Edel, Henry James: okay to use the abridged version. It's still 700 pages long.

Victoria Glendinning: Trollope. Better than his novels, and yet very like them.

Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: charts the complicated and often pathological marriages of five Victorian couples--the Carlyles, the Dickenses, the J. S. Mills, the Ruskins, and the George Henry Leweses (of George Eliot fame).

Peter Ackroyd, Dickens: if Dickens had written his own biography, it would read like this and it would be this long.

Historical Fiction:
Peter Quinn, Banished Children of Eve: I read this last week, despite the lurid title. It's an excellently researched novel set in New York City in 1863, during the period immediately preceding the draft riots. Lots of great local color, especially for those interested in Irish immigrant life in old New York, which I am.

Annie Proulx, That Old Ace in the Hole: with the exception of the awful Accordian Crimes, Proulx isn't usually thought of as a historical novelist. But she is very much one. Her best work (I would include Close Range: Wyoming Stories in this category) sets out quite self consciously to document dying ways of western American life and to draw meaningful connections between the present moment in which the fiction is set and the past whose traces it contains. That Old Ace in the Hole is a wonderful evocation of the decaying ranch culture of the Texas panhandle.

Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry: magical realism set during the era of the Irish Civil War. Beautifully written, entirely unforgettable.

Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever: Barrett has made a career out of writing meticulously researched stories about nineteenth-century science. One of a kind.

A.S. Byatt, Angels & Insects: Barrett draws a lot of inspiration from Byatt, who in turn owes a lot to George Eliot (but that's another post).

Charles Palliser, The Quincunx: this is the novel of nineteenth-century London that Dickens wishes he wrote, but did not. Don't start it unless you are prepared to be hijacked by it. Totally addictive.

In other news, Mandalei has launched an online reading group dedicated to The Iliad. The immediate motivation: her strong impression that no one in Troy had actually bothered to read Homer as preparation for making the film.

I need to go home to my library to refresh my memory but until I do here are some of my favorites:

Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis. This is Churchill's two-volume history of WWI. It may be his best work and is a masterpiece of prose and history. It is superior to his 6-volume history of WWII imho. His fair and dispasionate treatment of his own role in the Galipoli disaster is particularly noteworthy. "And withal, as an individual, preserved through these torments the glories of a reasonable and compassionate mind."

Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410. A fascinating look at a man and the development of Prato, Italy (a beautiful city near Florence)into the thriving heart of Italy's textile industry. Barbara Tuchman referred to this book as "one of the great works of historical writing of the twentieth century." Origo herself was a fascinating person. A biography of her life has just been published.

Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwhind.
The shelves are full of survivor memoirs of life in Stalin's Russia and the gulag. This one should stand out to those who read this blog because Ginzburg writes with great emotion and beauty about how prose and poetry saved her soul and her sanity during her long imprisonment. Books and poetry werre strictly rationed and she writes of how she learned to savor every word, every nuance. She indicates that she has never since been able to read a poem with as much understanding as when she was imprisoned. It is a beautiful peice of writing.

The Education of Henry Adams remains one of the best autobiographies one can hope to come upon.

For a good general overview you might try - Fernand Braudel's A History of Civilizations.

Ivan

I'll admit that I can't bear Barrett. But H.F.M. Prescott's *Man on a Donkey*, about the dissolution of the monasteries under H8 and the Pilgrimage of Grace, belongs on this list, without a doubt.

I think it was Churchill's "World Crisis" that provoked the remark (can't remember who said it) that "Winston has written a book about himself and called it The World Crisis."

Several of Barbara Tuchman's books belong on any list such as this--I love "The Guns of August" and "The Proud Tower."

I'm currently in the middle of a great biography, "Rambling Man," by Ed Cray, a life of Woody Guthrie.

In the spirit of Memorial Day:

Calvert, James F, Silent Running: My Years on a World War II Attack Submarine. An old manís memoirs and a different view of WWII than is typical. Published recently, it doesnít assume any knowledge of the 1940ís and little of the War. A good lead-in to Clear the Bridge!

OíKane, Richard, Clear the Bridge!: The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang. A well written memoir by a submarine captain who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. It is written for the general public, but might be better received by those with a technical bent. Liberal arts majors might find it to be a readable book from an unfamiliar perspective.

Churchill, Winston, History of the English Speaking People. A good overview. Donít be put off by the four volumes--the type is large. (Also, Churchillís My Early Life)

Hounshell, David, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932. Strangely, this is the only book I have seen that traces the rise of American Manufactures. Almost all others concentrate on the people and the social history. They all say that society was driven by industrialization, well this is the industrialization.

OíCallahan, Fr. Joeseph, I was Chaplain on the Franklin. In 1945, the aircraft carrier Franklin was hit by Japanese bombs which set fire to her aviation gasoline and munitions. She suffered 724 killed and 265 wounded. It has been years since I read this but the story sticks.

I recommend Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men as well as any biography by Richard Holmes (especially the ones of Shelley and Coleridge). Also, Walter Jackson Bate's classic biography of Samuel Johnson. (And though this may not be in the spirit of the list, I would also like to warn readers against the overrated biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman. Lots of other books out there much better worth your time, folks.)

Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor is an excellent historical novel, on the present-alternating-with-past model familiar to readers from A. S. Byatt's Possession.

Caryl Phillips's non-fiction book The Atlantic Sound also offers an intriguing mix of history, biography and journalism.

I am surprised no one mentioned "The Dubliners" since you are interested in Irish life.

H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold. This is an in-depth history of the California Gold Rush, the stories of several people involved with it, and the effect it had on the nation and its character. Fairly entertaining.

Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World. This is a history of Dutch Manhattan, based on records that have only recently been translated (seventeenth-century Dutch is much further from modern Dutch than seventeenth-century English is from modern English.) This book gives some perspective on a period of American history that is largely ignored or dismissed with a few sentences in pre-Revolutionary history.

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City. This is a history of the Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer who stalked it. The two events dovetail nicely as Larson explains the difficulties that the planners had to overcome, and the man who took advantage of the spectacle.

Nonfiction:
1. William Manchester, The Last Lion, Vol. 2, Alone. Churchill as the voice crying out in the wilderness during the 1930s.

2. David Halberstam, The Fifties. Terrifically readable -- as is usually the case when a reporter writes history.

3. Norman Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages. The quality of this book led me to other works of Cantor's, which I found to be disappointing. But this book is one of the best history books I've ever read.

Fiction:
1. I echo Penseur's recommendation of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin series, of which the first is Master and Commander. The writing style may be offputting at first; it seems to me archaic, probably deliberately so. Nevertheless, first rate; the best historical fiction I have ever read.

2. I am in the midst of reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque trilogy. I am no judge of the quality of the writing, but I find it thoroughly enjoyable, and educational on all sorts of obscure subjects as well. Also good is Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which is quasi-historical; it flips back and forth between the present and WWII.

3. Anything by Mary Renault set in ancient Greece. My favorite is The Last of the Wine, set in the time of Socrates.

More will come as I think of them.

I ethusiastically second The Guns of August" and The Great War and Modern Memory.

I'd add in no particular order:
The Transformation of Virginia by Rhys Isaacs, a social history that's actually worth something.
This Kind of War by T.R. Fehrenbach, an object lesson in what happens when politicians force the Army to go soft. A lesson we're relearning in Iraq.
The Mighty Endeavor by Charles MacDonald, if only to shatter the myth that the "real war" was fought on the Russian Front.
We Were Soldiers Once ... And Young by Harold Moore & Joseph L. Galloway, the only book I ever read that made me cry. Also it debunks the notion that draftees were bad soldiers who lost the Vietnam war.

For historical fiction, I'll take the wimps way out and recommend All Quiet on the Western Front, it remains a moving classic.

The mention of Mary Renault (who I am also very fond of) has reminded me of my very favorite historical novel: Robert Graves, I Claudius. (His others are peculiar but interesting, like Wife to Mr. Milton.) Another very good historical novelist is Gore Vidal; Julian's my favorite, but the Burr and Lincoln ones are excellent as well, if you prefer American to Roman stuff. And Rosemary Sutcliffe's young adult books set in Roman Britain are also well worth reading, if you like that kind of thing.

Historical Novels:

Thomas Flanagan's "The Year of the French" which, despite its title, is about Ireland (the uprising of the late 1700s which French troops were sent to support.) I knew very little about Irish history before reading this. Someone called it "the best historical novel in the English language," and I don't think they were too far off.

Erich Maria Remarque's "The Road Back"..a better novel, in my view, than his "All Quiet"...the book begins when the German veterans return home in 1918. Goes very well with the Fussell book in illuminating the impact of WWI on the zeitgeist.

History:
Art of War in the Western World, Archer Jones. I really can't think of a better book on the history of western warfare that I ever read.

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer. No comment needed, I hope.

Biography:
Marlborough, by Winston Churchill. This one's borderline, as having an understanding of Marlborough's times would help in reading it. However, I've thoroughly enjoyed it (when I have the time to read it... at two million words, it's a doozy).

Fiction:
Musashi, Eiji Yoshikawa.

Thin Red Line, James Jones (avoid the movie).

Well, it looks like my summer reading list just got a lot bigger! Thanks for all the great recommendations!

The finest historical novel I know (other than War and Peace) is The Succession: a Novel of Elizabeth and James, by George Garrett. In fact, it's one of my favorite books, period. I say that even though it received the single most extravagant blurb I have ever seen, from Annie Dillard: "Not since Chaucer has an English writer given us such powerful, vivid storytelling." Not since Chaucer??? I almost didn't read the book after seeing such unmeasured commendation. But I did read it, and while I think there may be a writer or two since the fourteenth century to match Garrett (or even better him), The Succession is truly wonderful.

George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels are a lot of fun too. They wooed me back to historical fiction about twenty years ago, after a long hiatus. There are brief footnotes at the end of the book expanding on the real figures and events salted throughout the fiction.

The Flashman novels make for great, fun reading.

Robert Caro's The Power Broker, his biography of New York's Robert Moses is also a great read, one I might go back to now that I have seen it collecting dust on my shelf.

As to historical demi-fiction there is always Mark Twain's Joan of Arc.

Last, for those with an inerest in religous history, I have just begun Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation. It has received rave reviews as a blanced overview of the reformation, the counter reformation and its impact on the social and political fabric of the times. Will review same if I manage to finish it.

Erin, it is posts like these that heighten the sympathy I have for the character Burgess Meredith once played in an old Twilight Zone episode.

1. Simon Schama's Citizens, an account of the French revolution in which a whole civilization comes alive. Worth for the cast of unforgetable characters such as Talleyrand, Danton, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre and many others.

2. Bernard Lewis's The Assassins, about a cult that terrorized the Middle East back in the Middle Ages.

3. Martin van Creveld, The transformation of war. A distillation of knowledge and wisdom about many aspects of the military, from sticks and stones all the way to nuclear war. Revolutionary and disturbing.

4. David Ayalon, Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom. How the mighty Mamluks failed to adapt to changes in military technology and lost their empire.

5. Gustav Herling, A world apart, about the author's experience in a Soviet concentration camp. For me the best account of the Gulag, a profound study of people in the most appalling circumstances imaginable.

Books by classicist Peter Green would count in two of these categories:
History - The Greco-Persian Wars
Biography - Alexander of Macedon
He's a terrific writer; you'll learn a lot and enjoy every minute of it.

Two books that I am working through at the moment are Jonathan Shay's 1) Achilles in Vietnam and 2) Odysseus in America.

Shay is a psychologist who has been working with Vietnam veterans for many years, helping them to deal with PTSD, their homecomings, issues of betrayal by COs or other leaders, etc., and he makes some very strong links between the Homeric epics and the experiences of our soldiers. Definitely thought provoking when dealing with the history of warfare.

I can't believe it: I looked here and at Random Penseur and no one has mentioned The Ugly American, by Burdick and Lederer. It essentially predicts the Vietnam War and it offers great insight as to why America is largely inept when it comes to diplomacy.

Cautionary note on Tuchman's The Guns of August: read it in conjunction with Keegan, and wherever there's any conflict, believe Keegan. That said, I enjoyed both Proud Tower and The March of Folly.

Personally, I preferred the first volume of Manchester's Churchill biography. Churchill's first sixty-two years were just do darn interesting. Manchester's American Caesar about MacArthur isn't too bad, though it's a bit too adulatory toward Emperor Doug for my taste.

I don't know quite how far you want to take historical fiction, but the aforementioned Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicle trilogy is the best Arthurian saga of the past, oh, quarter century, at least. His current 14th century novels are well researched, but the story has started off less promisingly.

Robert Leckie's Delivered From Evil clocks in at a weighty 942 pages in paperback, but it's easy reading and it'd be tough to do a better one-volume history of a conflict as complex as the Second World War.

Nice to seem I'm not the only one who's read and enjoyed Eiji Yoshikawa.

Can't help but notice that the "social problem" novel dominates this list. I kinda of like that stuff, or I did at some point in the past. But, I think that the attachment to the social problem novel says something about why the English lit department seems to want to make itself irrelevant.

What if most of the important social problems are solved? I began to think about this a decade ago when I took a tour of a number of U.S. cities and noticed that the beggars were obese. What we now describe as poverty in the U.S. is a life that includes a decent apartment, a late model car, a diet that leads to obesity and a large screen color TV. This level of wealth is spreading throughout the world.

Don't you sort of lose credibility when you face a class and demand (as was always demanded of me) a "passionate response" when the social problems become smaller and smaller?

Is it worth our while to educate another generation of students in the greater glory of solving social problems when most of our problems arise from excess spare time and too much food?

What is missing from this list is the overwhelming optimism of life in the U.S. Something else also missing is the old-fashioned macho love of adventure and the exotic just for the sake of it. More to the point, in my old age I read motorcycle magazines and visit travel sites to find exciting, worthwhile reading. Isn't it time for the English department to stop pretending that we are fighting the good fight against poverty and starvation? Isn't it time to admit that the modern world offers spectacular happiness to those who know who to find it?

I think if you read The Transformation of Virginia you'll find that it's a fairly optimistic book. In 18th century Virginia, poverty was on the decline, enfranchisement and freedom (especially freedom of religion) were on the rise.
As for English departments, may as well be p***ing a forest fire. When you're a professional feminist, it's your job to be oppressed and offended. Doesn't make for much happiness.

History:
Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America : What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong by James W. Loewen
Very readable and good for follow-up reading if you've read a high-school text on U.S. history

History of the United States by Philip Jenkins and The Penguin History of the United States of America by Hugh Brogan
Concise, readable surveys of U.S. history.

Historical Fiction:
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. Exceptionally well researched depiction of 1850's England and Tasmania.

Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor. On dealing with the Irish famine and migrating
to America. Also very well researched.

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. It's not intended as historical fiction
but since it's thirty years old it works well as a history.

Popular history books to avoid include A People's History of the United States by Zinn and A History of the American People by Johnson

Oh I forgot three other surveys:
Modern Mind : An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson
Covers science in more depth that you'd expect from a typical survey

From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun and The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski
As long as you're conscious that you're getting a very personal interpretation of history, these two are very good.

Sophie's World is supposed to be a good history of philosophy but I haven't read it yet.

Timothy Garton Ash, _The File: A Personal History_. Ash revisits his early years after Oxford through the file that the Stasi kept on him, while interviewing the informers, case officers, and other bureaucrats involved.

Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell's book on Custer and the Little Bighorn, is fascinating, reading like a novel rather than an academic history. Connell will take up a topic, say, scalping, and head off on a sojourn lasting pages. The details are wonderful: He describes one tribe in the Dakotas that had migrated from the south centuries before and still painted alligators on their chests to ward off evil while crossing rivers. I read the book during a cross-country trip some years back that included a stop at Little Bighorn, and gained a much greater appreciation for what had taken place on that piece of Montana prairie a century before, and for all those white stones running from the river up the grassy hill.

"The Making of the English Working Class" by E P Thompson is a classic that will appeal to those who are interested in social history.

"Washington and Caesar", Christian Cameron. Well written novel about Africans fighting for the British against the Americans.

"A Boy Called H", Kappa Sentoh, a witty semi-autobigraphical novel about a precocious boy growing up in wartime Japan.

"Silence", Shusaku Endo. A Japanese Christian writer. Also "Samurai" by same author.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms
History fiction of 3 kingdom era of China

For history, Peter Hopkirk is outstanding. He writes mainly about the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia, from the seventeen hundreds through the early twentieth century. The theme of his books is "History as Adventure Story". Probably the best is The Great Game, about the struggle in the nineteenth century between the British moving north from India, the Russians heading south, and the varied native powers. A close second is Trespassers on the Roof of the World, which features Tibet trying to keep out the British and Chinese.

Byron Farwell, who does "History as Anecdote", is also quite enjoyable. His best is Queen Victoria's Little Wars , about the constant minor colonial wars the British Empire fought as it expanded accross the globe.

The best historical fiction I've read recently is Connie Willis' Doomsday Book. It's actually science fiction, the winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Half the action follows a time-travelling historian who winds up in the middle ages. It's an excellent character-driven story, and, best of all, the medieval people don't act as if they are twenty-first century transplants, bemoaning sexism and classism while slapping moldy bread on each other's wounds.

Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier

Reckless Youth by Nigel Hamilton is a brilliant biog of JFK until he becomes a congressman. I absolutley love Proulx as well, and did my thesis on Close Range as an image of WY. It was a lot of fun to do.

Jeffrey Boulier: Have you read the semi-sequel to Doomsday Book? To Say Nothing of the Dog is set in the same universe, with passing mention of some of the characters from DB, but is a comedy where DB was a tragedy, and is set in Victorian England. Infinitely silly, and very fun.

Robert Caro is by far the master of the readable history/biography. His meticulously researched, eminently readable books take on not just the history of an individual, but the history of an era. His classic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker is masterful, and requires no previous understanding of the subject. Similarly, the LBJ books are a great introduction to politics and 20th Century American history. If you read only one, make it Master of the Senate which begins with a fascinating history of the U.S. Senate which every politically aware American should read.

Historical Fiction: One of my favorites is Gene Wolfe's Latro in the Mist, a fascinating novel about Ancient Greece. The main character is an ex-mercenary in the army of the Great King (of Persia) who has lost his long-term memory (this was written long before the film Memento, but it's the same idea). The book is a sort of diary he writes to remind himself of recent events. The loss of memory means that he approaches Greek culture as an innocent, and tries to understand it as best he can. This distancing device helps preserve our sense of how strange and different this culture was. Very much worth reading.

MEN AT AXLIR by Dominic Cooper is a "fiction" about a case of incest that occurred in eighteenth-century Iceland. This isolated Scandinavian country was devastated by epidemics and volcanic cataclysm. The author's treatment, however, is not sensationalistic. This was, for me, one of those books you buy for yourself after reading a library copy.

Historical fiction: the smartest writer of historicals in the 19th and early 20th centuries was Stanley Weyman, who did the Orczy (Scarlet Pimpernel) and Sabatini (Sea Hawk, Captain Blood) thing before them and better than them. Weyman stands at the pinnacle of 19th century historical romance writing. In the words of critic Jessia Salmonson,

"Weyman's great contribution to perfecting the historical romance in it's purest "swashbuckler" mode was to take all that was most thrilling about Alexander Dumas & Sir Walter Scott & get rid of everything that was tedious. That is not to say he made it simpler; he evaded stating the obvious, he used correct history as background without lecturing about it, he was never a blow-hard. He depended on environment & momentous occasion to guide the characters through a story. This resulted in a swift, forward-moving & suspenseful plot punctuated with action, heroism, witticism, & romance both of the high adventure-sort & the sort that requires a leading lady."

Weyman's books are smart, deceptively thoughtful, and enormously enjoyable. For starters: From the Memoirs of a Minister of France, A Gentleman of France, and The Red Cockade.

Ditto on Doomsday Book.
Any of Cecelia Holland's first 10 or so novels (after that, the quality started to decline), especially Until the Sun Falls, the only historical novel I know of about the Mongols.

Also, sort of history, but unlike anything else: Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean.

Works of history

Tuchman's The Proud Tower and A Distant Mirror
Lord Kinross Ataturk and The Ottomans
Katie Hickman Courtesans fascinating read about five different women who were courtesans and the leading beauties of their day in the 1800s.
Thuycidides The Pelleponisian War The prototype of writing history and the prototype of human conflict.

Historical fiction
George McDonald Fraser's Flashman series

Current reading
Eighteen Years in the Khyber by Col. Sir Robert Warburton Warburton was the political officier for 18 years in the late 1800s.

Raj The Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James Good and detailed account of British India. Plus it lead to the discovery of Warburton's book, which I had not known he wrote.

I had a similar list here, and I think the books on it meet the criteria:

http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/001581.html

I agree completely that Hounshell's book on mass production is unique and brilliant.

I would add Ernst Junger's memoir The Storm of Steel, for the German perspective on World War I. Recently reissued with a new translation.