Credentials

I graduated from Hillsdale College in 2004 with a degree in ancient history, where I learned a great deal about the basics of historical study and how to read and translate ancient Latin and Greek. Since then, I've done a lot of reading. Below are some of the authors and texts I've studied and used in my understanding of history.

Any and all of these books are supplemented by original documents.

Ancient History:

The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, by Rodney Stark, Ph.D. (Baylor) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Pagans and Christians, by Robin Lane Fox, Ph.D. (Oxford U's New College)

On the Reliability of the Old Testament, by Kenneth Kitchen, Ph.D. (University of Liverpool, England)
(currently reading)

A Noise of War, by A. J. Langguth (excellent. so very, very excellent)

anything by Milman Perry, who was a genius


Medieval History:

A Concise History of the Crusades, by Thomas F. Madden (St. Louis University)

A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara W. Tuchman (Tuchman is one of the most readable authors of history I've ever read, and it's telling that she has no Ph.D. and does not work as a professor. She actually got her start as a journalist.)

Updates as books are added.

What This Is

Most textbooks suck.

The reason is simple - most scholars cannot study what they want for a living without getting a Ph.D., which is usually a prerequisite for getting hired at any university. Then comes the teaching, and only then come the grants, which allow for the studying that the scholar has waited for. And among the requirements for getting a Ph.D. is discovering something new - in math, something completely new, or in history, something that hasn't been heavily researched before. If you were a student of, say, international relations in the 16th century, you'd be in luck - enough is known about the period to find your way around, but not so much that you'd have to pick something so boring and obscure that no one in their right mind would care to read it. If, on the other hand, you were a student of American History, you'd probably have to write about something as dull as the evolution of the typewriter to get the coveted Ph.D., which would allow you the financial stability and freedom to study that you'd be seeking.

(For the record, the typewriter topic has been taken.)

And this is why textbooks suck. They're not written by one person - they're written as a collaborative effort by several scholars who have spent god knows how much time studying obscure topics in history to get a Ph.D. And when you study one thing for too long, you begin to lose sight of what is important and begin vomiting out all the useless details you can think of. And once you have about fifty scholars contributing information for such a book, you end up with a compendium of detail that no one could possibly remember for longer than it takes to pass a test.

And that, in my opinion, isn't a great way to learn.

I'm not battling the Ph.D. process with this blog - the system works, because it produces great scholars (a Ph.D. in and of itself is basically a title giving its bearer the authority to research things on his or her own, not an admission of mastery of a subject). But it's not a great way to make textbooks. And so, in the hope of one day producing fantastic textbooks on my own, I'm submitting sections here for public approval/disapproval/advice. The sections that get the best reactions will one day be included in the books I hope to produce.

So read on. And if you uunderstand when you're done, drop me a line, and I will be eternally grateful.

(Because, more than likely, it might make me rich.)