Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy Book

This is a really fun—and actually quite comprehensive—historical overview. It's very handy as sort of a quick-reference guide and/or as a supplemental companion to the reading of primary source history texts. (I found it to be fabulously helpful along these lines with respect to Herodotus.)

A couple of disclaimers, primarily applicable to younger readers:

First off, the subject of sex is treated with direct frankness throughout. (This shouldn't be a problem, really. Gonick's emphasis on sex is roughly equivalent to the emphasis given in the primary source texts with which he is dealing, the biblical texts certainly being no exception.)

And speaking of the Bible, that brings up the second yellow flag. Gonick is a big-time skeptic and antagonist of the Bible and the Christian Faith. The good news, however, is that his skepticism typically amounts to the rather facile type of junior-highesque nay-saying that can be answered fairly easily. To provide one example, his treatment of the episode between Elijah and the priests of Baal is all "Oh sure. The 'water' that Elijah had dumped on the sacrifice was probably some kind of oil, to which he stealthily lit a match. Besides, there was a three year drought going on, so where did he get all that water anyway?". To which the reply is "Well, actually, Mount Carmel is right next to the sea, which, even during the most prolonged drought would have no shortage of water which, though undrinkable, would nonetheless have sufficed for Elijah's purposes well enough."

At any rate, I find it pretty easy to overlook his skeptical handling of biblical history given the fact that he nonetheless treats it, more-or-less at least, as history, (just as he also does, incidentally, with some of the mythologies of Greece and of the other cultures represented). Ironically enough, this is a refreshing approach that I think a few Christian colleges and universities could take a cue from.