I've found in much reading over many decades that the mind-blowing stuff comes not from facts and even movements of peoples, but changes in ideas and in our perception of the world.
To that end, the single best book I can recommend is Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield's The Discovery of Time, published in 1965.
We take it for granted that we live in a dynamic changing universe with growth and development, but for most of human history in most cultures the opposite was true: The world was static, most change was a fall from a previous high, people's places were fixed, time was fixed, the world was fixed.
(I'm not sweeping aside creation myths, because in most myths the world was created at a specific time to be exactly as it is right now and as it will be forever or until the end, depending on the myth. Static, no change, no development.)
A few centuries ago, there began serious intellectual and philosophical investigation into the possibly of changing time, of a dynamic universe, of serious consideration of the possibility the universe had a beginning outside of religious creationism. Over time, the notion that time itself changed seeped through and into all thinking.
Without that change in perspective, Darwin and others might never have done their work....
What I find personally most interesting is trying to shift my head to imagine what it would have been like to live in a world with static time in an Earth-centric universe.
That exercise is the most eye-popping of all, IMHO.
As an aside, over the decades my interest/fascination in history has waxed and waned, in part because there is simply so much to read, so much to learn, that it can be overwhelming. Consider the simple fact of the millions of stories in WWII alone, and one can easily imagine spending a lifetime learning more and more about a single period, a single event, and never learn it all.
Every now and again I'll plunge into an area of interest, either through a maze of Wikipedia articles or a really good book (Team of Rivals; Churchill's memoirs of WWII; Paris 1919; etc.), but overall I prefer those works that challenge me to change my intellectual and artistic perspective (Age of Insight, about Vienna, is good for that).
Comments
I've found in much reading over many decades that the mind-blowing stuff comes not from facts and even movements of peoples, but changes in ideas and in our perception of the world.
To that end, the single best book I can recommend is Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield's The Discovery of Time, published in 1965.
We take it for granted that we live in a dynamic changing universe with growth and development, but for most of human history in most cultures the opposite was true: The world was static, most change was a fall from a previous high, people's places were fixed, time was fixed, the world was fixed.
(I'm not sweeping aside creation myths, because in most myths the world was created at a specific time to be exactly as it is right now and as it will be forever or until the end, depending on the myth. Static, no change, no development.)
A few centuries ago, there began serious intellectual and philosophical investigation into the possibly of changing time, of a dynamic universe, of serious consideration of the possibility the universe had a beginning outside of religious creationism. Over time, the notion that time itself changed seeped through and into all thinking.
Without that change in perspective, Darwin and others might never have done their work....
What I find personally most interesting is trying to shift my head to imagine what it would have been like to live in a world with static time in an Earth-centric universe.
That exercise is the most eye-popping of all, IMHO.
As an aside, over the decades my interest/fascination in history has waxed and waned, in part because there is simply so much to read, so much to learn, that it can be overwhelming. Consider the simple fact of the millions of stories in WWII alone, and one can easily imagine spending a lifetime learning more and more about a single period, a single event, and never learn it all.
Every now and again I'll plunge into an area of interest, either through a maze of Wikipedia articles or a really good book (Team of Rivals; Churchill's memoirs of WWII; Paris 1919; etc.), but overall I prefer those works that challenge me to change my intellectual and artistic perspective (Age of Insight, about Vienna, is good for that).