Those who can, teach history
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
> Person 2: ...Are you trying to teach me something?
For someone who is not aiming to be an expert or work with source records, but wants to improve their general awareness and erudition.
- logic - critical thinking
After that, depending on your particular bent, you want some facility with languages ( some already dead ). In other words, it genuinely may not be for everyone.
Shrug. Little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Giving someone tools to create black hole does not ensure that they will be able to utilize that knowledge in a manner that.. is useful.
In other words, it may not be absolutely necessary, but it is.. not helpful to suggest accessibility is key. If anything, accessibility makes it dumber; not completely unlike systemD in linux. It serves a purpose, but it dumbs things down.
By that I mean:
- learn to think critically - learn to apply logic
After that, the world is your oyster, but if you actually want to learn.. and not just.. consume what someone else throws at you, then it will be worthwhile to, you know, learn a thing or two: like, for example, language of the primary sources. I know. I know. There I go gate keeping again.
I will try to narrow it down a little:
"Reading a few books gives you a sketch of an idea someone else had."
Does that help?
And I find podcasts gradually lead me towards books. It's just harder to read a book while walking my dog.
If you find yourself wanting something better, the next steps up are any of the numerous world history books from Oxford/Cambridge university presses. Beyond that you should really be picking more narrow areas/periods to go into.
Take, for instance, approaching history from the perspective of seeking an "objective take". That's great if you want to be on the cutting edge of historical methodologies from the 1930s, but it's something we try to disabuse undergrads of today because it's not very useful. The modern view is that all histories are narratives and the job of the historian is to render our understanding of it as fully and fairly as possible. David Stack's paper is a pretty good introduction [0] to this idea.
And so, take a look at the Human History page on Wiki [1]. There are lots of things I disagree with (the use of the term "Hinduism" for LBA religion, the "Cradles of Civilization" view is a particular choice, etc), but it hits a lot of the right points as well. Seriously, you have no idea how few popular history sources almost completely forget that there's a world outside Eurasia. Frankly, the article as a whole is a perfectly adequate introduction to world history, with lots of branching-off points for the things that interest you.
You can choose to go beyond that with things like the 7.5 volume Cambridge World History series [2], but the sheer amount of text makes that terrible advice for most people. Nor can I recommend pop media because the media with the most production value is almost always the worst informationally.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12824
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/series/cambridge-world-histor...
It's honestly a hard question and depends on you. I think there's two core challenges: 1. What would be interesting to you and motivate you 2. Finding quality sources
The first one is easy but the second one is hard if you don't already know a fair amount of history, and there's tons of junk out there.
I'm admittedly pretty snobby on my sources but some recommendations (pick whatever works for you): - The Revolutions podcast is excellent. Made by the same guy as History of Rome - Unironically, the AskHistorians subreddit is a gem. It's hard to find questions with answers. Just search for their Sunday day of reflection posts. It's a compilation of interesting answers - If you're able to get into textbooks (not everyone is), do a search for an intro level textbook that's a short survey of an area/time. For example you find smallish intros to most regions and times from Cambridge
What are you interested in and how do you think you'd enjoy learning?
A more feasible start would be to ask, "What is my world? What trends brought us here? When did they begin and how did they evolve?"
It's filled in both so many gaps and made me increasingly curious about many periods/places that I previously felt disengaged about -- and led to much more reading of actual history
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLREQ8S3NPaQvNTsYrqph8T4hn...
His more recent work has waded into more speculative and controversial subjects but I don't think his World Civ playlist is itself controversial.