You might be interested in The High and the Mighty. It's more recent, about the boom in SUVs at the end of the 90s. It came out right before gas prices spiked in the mid 2000s. It ends with a bunch of questions that kind of got delayed b/c of the high gas prices, but are relevant again.

The part you might like about it is it looks at how the design eased insecurities in society and played into certain ideas of toughness/ruggedness but also sort of addressed women's desires that had been ignored up until then that were positive in one way, but still used safety standards that basically ignored women and had negative impacts in other ways.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/832299.High_and_Mighty

Peter Stark's book, Young Washington is a great look at the development of Washington. He was a really interesting guy and his childhood was rough.

Also, Tom Rick's book, First Principles covers those three with a dash of Madison and their intellectual life. It was a good book. I'd recommend reading it with Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum.

The Fire is Upon Us by Nick Buccola. This was an interesting book that came out a really opportune time. It explains a lot of the racism within the Republican voting public and how the GOP has harnessed it.

False Cause by Adam Domby. I liked this b/c it explained some of the political mechanisms used to develop the Lost Cause Narrative and why it was important to local political powers to have that narrative.

Until Justice Done by Kate Masur. I thought it was interesting to see how the South used federal power in the antebellum period to run roughshod over state's rights arguments from the Northern states, exactly the opposite of their later claims after the war.

Postwar by Tony Judt. I don't think there's anything better for understanding the late 20th Century.

The Walter Stahr biographies of Seward, Stanton, and the new one about Chase. These men did so much to shape the modern world and the modern American government system and they really don't get enough credit or focus. Stahr's biographies are fascinating.

Besides the Caro book on Robert Moses I would maybe look at Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking about some of the inefficiencies of promoting car centered transportation on urban development.

There are books that kind of cover this stuff, but they're not very good. It's just not a great way to learn history. There's this kind of idea of history being a series of events that happened in a certain order, but that's not really the interesting or valuable thing about it. You're much more likely to be able to remember about the stuff during a period if you're reading about the context around and understanding why it's important.

I would maybe look at a specific event like the Great Depression to understand how the financial system was changed during the 20th century b/c that will tell you a lot more about the world than knowing the Suez Crisis happened before the War of Attrition, and it will also tell you more about the Suez Crisis than the military implications.

There's a book I love, but it's kind of an undertaking called Postwar by Tony Judt that does a good job of explaining the postwar system in Europe. It's a great book but might be a lot to handle if you don't usually read history.

I would maybe start with something like Galbraith's The Great Crash, 1929 to understand the 20th century.

You might dig this thread on /r/badhistory. The post has a list of his sources that you could check out. https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/r3g8aq/eight_thanksgiving_myths_from_grave_robbing/

The Marie Arana biography of Bolivar received good reviews when it came out and there's tons of used copies floating around at this point.

She gave a good talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia on this back when it came out. https://libwww.freelibrary.org/podcast/episode/1414

She was also there last week or so to talk about her new book on Sam Adams.

If you're into this sort of thing I'd definitely recommend Judy Batalion's Light of Days. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/books/review/light-of-days-judy-batalion.html

I read Turning of the Screw immediately after that and totally missed that it was a ghost story. A Death in Venice totally primed my mind. I thought the TotS was about child molestation until the very very end and I'm still not sure it isn't.

That was an interesting book. My book group read it a few months ago. The author was on the New Books Network not long ago too.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/pioneering-death

The cabin part is real, but for the most part people weren't isolated on the frontier. There were already people there. They might have been Indians, but usually early settlers were reliant on Indians and involved to some extent in their community. There was a recent book about Daniel Boone and his time on the frontier called The Kidnapping of Jemima Boone by Matthew Pearl that might be worth checking out. There's a couple recent books, one by Cassandra Tate and one by Blaine Harden on the Whitmans. They were pretty early settlers but you'll see they were still integrated into a community of settlers. If you want to get stories about the "lone white person" in a frontier area, you can look at the fur trappers, but all of them were integrated in one way or another into the indigenous communities. Usually they took an Indian wife so they could have freedom to travel and access to hunting. Maybe check out something like Ted Morgan's Wilderness at Dawn.

For N. American indigenous cultures maybe start with An Indigenous People's History of the United States by Rosa Dunbar Ortiz. It's a rough overview but manageable. Masters of Empire is a good book about the Anishinaabe people of Great Lakes region and there was recently a book called Seeing Red by Michael John Witgen that looks like it would be a good follow up. The Northern Paiutes of the Malheur by Dan Wilson is a good intro to one of the Great Basin groups. Chinookan People of the Lower Columbia, edited by Robert Boyd is a good overview of one of the Columbia groups.

For Rome, I'd check out Pride of Carthage by David Anthony Durham. It's set in the Punic Wars and is a multi-POV of different people in Hannibal's army.

Have you read the Maria Arana biography? That's the most recent non academic biography that got a lot reach.

Is that lady that "restored" the medieval fresco single? Maybe they could hook up?

There's two main reasons. One is more pragmatic and the other is about long term political interests. The first one is that at the time, cotton exhausted the soil. Plantation crops, especially cotton couldn't keep being planted on the same soil economically. In this period there wasn't as much understanding of soil maintenance and health, and while there was some chemical fertilizer (Daniel Immerwahr's book, How To Hide An Empire gets into the importance to the development of American empire bird guano was b/c of its use as fertilizer) it wasn't as economical to transport into the south and use. So the Southern states constantly wanted new territory to expand to.

The political reason was that free states were expanding. B/c of the Constitutional preferences for slave owners in the Constitution, the South was able to impose their interests on the Northern states. But if the North population kept expanding faster than the south, and if the US added more free states, the South's advantage thanks to the 3/5ths clause would totally disappear and it's stranglehold on the Senate would be gone. At the time of the Civil War, the south had only about 1/3 of the population of the North. On top of that, 1/3 of the South's population was enslaved, so their interests were represented and they gave a representational boost to their enslavers against Northerners. So, if the balance of population kept shifting, the South, already weak in the House, would be totally ignored, and their abuse of minority power in the Senate would be totally sidelined. They had to keep expanding and adding more slave states or become a political non-entity.

This is a tough question and I don't think I've ever come across a good definition or any criteria. Part of the problem is that the realization that people moved around a lot before Europeans showed up, is kind of a recent phenomenon. It's obvious if you think about it for a few minutes, and it's even evident in texts, but it wasn't really considered important until the late 60s when cultural studies got established and people started seriously researching the question.

It's interesting how unseriously your question was taken until the last few decades b/c we have stories and information like part of the "Aztec" origin myth is that they migrated to the Mexico City valley in waves between 600 and 1000 CE, so it was staring us in the face the whole time. Another interesting one is when the Spaniards first arrived in Texas they were approached by Jumano people who were looking for allies b/c they were being pushed out of the area by Comanche and Apache peoples.

I'm personally very interested in the US Civil War. B/c of that one of my favorite history podcasts is The Rogue Historian. He has lots of good interviews with people who study or work in the field. https://keithharrishistory.com/

I also really like The New Books Network history channel. It's a podcast with interviews of authors of academic books on history. There's a lot of content and not all of it is interesting. I don't listen to every podcast, I just focus on ones I think are interesting. But there is a huge amount of content. If it's too much you can focus on more specific types of history. https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/history-1/history

I've also recently started listening to History That Doesn't Suck: https://historythatdoesntsuck.com/

and Backstory: https://www.backstoryradio.org/

These are more general history podcasts for the everyday listener but they have interesting stuff.

I'd also recommend all of Mike Duncan's work and the wonderful BBC podcast In Our Times. In Our Times is especially fascinating and I think it's a great model of what good public media could provide to the public.

I also like Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I will say that Dan focuses on narrative and he uses a lot of older texts that fall into the Great Man trope. That means his podcasts have a lot of bad information and a fairly limited historical viewpoint. But they are interesting to listen to. They're just a little too focused on war from an upper class white male perspective. Dan's getting better though and is starting to try and consider other viewpoints on the topic.

I'm with /u/platitood on this question. The draft was initiated in the lead up to WWII and b/c of US military occupation and peace keeping duties it wasn't immediately ended after the war. Then the cold war happened and the draft became a fairly permanent part of US culture. So, there actually wasn't a draft "for" the Vietnam war. There was just a draft that had been a US rite of passage for men since 1940. Vietnam created a need for more troops, but most of the draftees didn't go to Vietnam. Only about 25% of troops in Vietnam troops were draftees. B/c of the war's modern unpopularity a misconception has grown that it was initially unpopular. That wasn't true and many happily went.

One thing that complicates this is a lot of volunteers volunteered b/c they knew that they were likely to be drafted and they would have more control over where they went and what they did if they volunteered. My dad was one of these. He is Chicano and at the Black Americans (especially in the S. where there is a history of discrimination in who they drafted to place most of the burden on the Black community) and Latinos knew they were being disproportionately placed in the more dangerous zones to protect white lives. So, my dad, knowing he would be drafted, volunteered for the Navy so he could avoid being sent to the infantry. Some estimates are that as many as 55% of volunteers were people like my dad who knew they'd be drafted and the way to assert some control over the process was to volunteer.

There was good /r/askhistorians answer on this a while ago that's worth checking out. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/by8kqr/were_there_many_volunteer_soldiers_during_vietnam/

You're seeing pushback from the other posters about the term "primitive" which is inherently a value judgment. It's generally a term that's not used in history when talking about cultures. It will sometimes be used to talk about specific technologies in relation to one and other. It's usually used in the sense that some technology were a primitive version of another technology, like roman numerals being a more primitive system than a number system that has the concept of zero.

B/c of that, and the way cultures evolve, every society will have systems that are more or less advanced than other systems. While the US may have the more advanced cruise missile systems in the world, our health care system is a target of mockery for large sections of the rest of the world.

And often the system that's seen as primitive is actually too advanced for the judging group to understand. A good example is the Conquistador's impression of Tenochtitlan's system of hydro-logical urban planning. They tore it apart and to this day Mexico City has problems with flooding and water shortages b/c of a lack of understanding of the valley's hydrology.

This is fiction about the period, but it's fun to read and gives you an understanding of how diverse of a culture existed in the area during that time. The first is a novel called Hild by Nicola Griffith. It's set in the 7th century, before England has been unified and you see the way various cultures are working and competing with each other, the signifiers that different languages hold, and the encroachment of Christianity and it's adaptation with local religions.

The other fun would be the Saxon Chronicles. The TV show The Last Kingdom is based on them. But it shows how the "viking" incursion of England was more of a mix of invasion, trade war, political compromise, and cultural melding.

These are obviously works of fiction that prioritize narrative over hard facts, but both authors did a lot of research and I think in this instance it's helpful to get this kind of exposure to the culture b/c it's so alien from our current conception of England. Almost no one would describe modern England first and foremost as a cultural and linguistic melting pot without an established culture. And although it's not quite true that England didn't have an established culture in the 7th century, things were a lot more in flux. These books help you understand that, and which cultures where struggling to find accommodation within what would become the idea of England in a national sense.

The author did an interview over on The New Books Network that I found interesting. You might dig it if you liked the book: https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-dope

I finished Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher. It was interesting and on a topic I didn't know much about. It's about Edward Curtis who was a photographer in Seattle who embarked on a huge project at the turn of the last century to photograph and document the remaining Indian cultures before they disappeared. He was an innovator in film, perfecting new methods for developing and preparing photos, in musicology, using an early recording device to capture Indian music, linguistics, writing alphabets and pronunciation guides as well as recording languages (Sometimes from the last living speaker), and film, making one of the first feature films.

The work was 20 volumes, but he had constant financial issues that limited the production of the work. Extant copies today sell at auction for $1.5+ million dollars.

The work has helped modern Indian communities rebuild their languages, Hopis use his work in their app that helps teach young children the language, and their culture, the Makah used his film to help understand their ceremonies around whaling and canoe building.

Curtis's photos are so universal that if you've ever seen an exhibit on a Native American group there was almost certainly a Curtis photo in the exhibit or on the program.

I think the most interesting thing he did was get at the truth of the Battle of Bighorn. He went to the site, interviewed Crow and Sioux participants and eye witnesses and reframed the whole event into the story we know today.

I highly recommend this if you're interested in the Pac NW, in photography, or in Native American culture.

Northwestern University has a full set online you can browse through: https://dc.library.northwestern.edu/items/2c3688e5-8d3b-4281-b20a-2bd99b436b89

On the Nature of Things is pretty freely available on the internet and a pretty quick read if anyone wants to read Lucretius's ideas.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/785