Reading the Histories in 2017...and a bit longer than that

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Ruth at A Great Book Study and Cleo at Classical Carousel are starting a history reading challenge in January.  It isn't the usual format of challenges, and it won't just go for one year; they're working on the list of books in The Well-Educated Mind (by my personal homeschooling guru, Susan Wise Bauer) and have gotten to the Histories section.  So they're reading through the list, somewhat in tandem, and the rest of us are free to join in or participate as we wish.  I read many of the novels with Ruth and company, and I pretty much skipped the biographies, but I'll be joining in on quite a few of the histories--I hope.  I don't know about this Gibbon fellow.


Here's a list of the books:

    The Histories by Herodotus
    The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
    The Republic by Plato
    Plutarch’s Lives
    The City of God by St. Augustine
    The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
    The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
    Utopia by Sir Thomas More
    The True End of Civil Government by John Locke
    The History of England, Vol. V by David Hume
    The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
    Common Sense by Thomas Paine
    The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
    Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville
    The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
    The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
    The Souls of Black Folk by W.E. B. Du Bois
    The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
    Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey
    The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
    The New England Mind by Perry Miller
    The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
    The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan
    The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
    Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese
    A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman
    All the President's Men by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
    Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson
    A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
    The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

As you can see, this is a list that will take quite a lot longer than a year to read!  Some of these I have read recently enough that I don't plan to read with the group, and some I don't particularly want to read at all.

There is also a Goodreads group for discussion, which I'll be joining, though quite honestly I am terrible at participating in Goodreads groups.  I hate the interface.

Want to join in?  Join the Goodreads group or let Ruth and Cleo know!

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 8, 2016 at 11:23 AM

    How ambitious! Best of luck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. CleoDecember 8, 2016 at 8:59 PM

    I'm happy to hear that you're along for the ride ..... or most of it! And I don't know about that Gibbon fellow either. Reading about him, I feel his views might not be as unbiased as I hoped, but I'll give him a chance. Then we'll see ..... :-)

    ReplyDelete

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