Reviews for Readings in American History

The average rating for Readings in American History based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-23 00:00:00 Nathan Arcy We’ve just been to Greece for two weeks, on the sort of tour that cherry picks something like the top ten essential Greek sites you must see before you die - it’s very difficult to manage your own itineraries so far away from Australia, with only a tiny smattering of Greek at your disposal. When I saw this book at the local library I thought it would have historical information organized by location that would help me with the places we visited, but it’s much more interesting than that - a potted history of Greece from 3000 BC, give or take a few, up till 2002. The tour concentrated on the sites of classical antiquity (Acropolis, Delphi, Olympia, etc) with Meteora, Knossos and Rhodes thrown in. We encountered Cycladic art for the first time - not in the Cyclades themselves, but in souvenir shops and museums in Athens, especially thenMuseum of Cycladic Art, very close to the wonderful Benaki Museum. Where did that come from? In that Museum, which features superb examples of sculpture, jewllery and other arts from many periods of Greek history and was not on the tour, but one we visited on our own, there were floors of costumes featured as Greek traditional, many of them wedding dresses, heavily hung with jewelry, that represented the bride’s family wealth. Where did the design, style and social meaning of these costumes come from? Byzantine Greece? Don’t know. All I can easily find for that period is the rich robes of the ruling and wealthy classes. Slavic elements? Turkish? Questions kept occurring wherever we went. Why did this or that civilization decline? What replaced it? What continuities were there? Are there still continuities from the great pasts we recognize from standard ancient histories? I didn’t find anything much to help me with costume or culinary traditions, for instance, but did find the brief references to underlying philosophies of artistic expression interesting pointers to further research if I were so minded. The clearest things I learned from this admirable little,book, however, are the endlessly recurring fragmentation of Greek politics from the earliest city state rivalries to the self-destruction of the post WWII civil war and the fractious divisions of contemporary Greece. I also found it fascinating to read of the Great Idea that dominated Greek foreign policy from the C19 and which has repeatedly had disastrous military and economic consequences for Greece: the dream of a shrunken Greece state resuming territory it once held in the classical era or as part of the Byzantine Empire. The ethnic catastrophes of the 1920s stemmed directly from this, as do the current tensions with Turkey. I highly recommend it as a political and lightly cultural introductory history of Greece over a 5000+ year span of history. Fortunately I have a friend who is passionately interested in Greek textile and costume history and who’ll be able to point me in the right direction to answer my question, and I already know the links between Turkish and Greek food traditions. The Byzantine cultural connections remain a gap. Maybe I finally need to tackle Norwich, who has been sitting on my shelves for about 20 years.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-05-17 00:00:00 Terence Pare Overall I thought this was a pretty good, concise history of what is now modern-day Greece. Sure, it could have used more detail in some places and less in others, but when you are trying to jam the entire history of a country into 300 pages or less, I understand that you have to make some sacrifices and hard decisions about what to include and not include. To speak to some of those decisions, I thought it could have used more content on the cultural aspects of Greece, including how their relationships with the Turks, Romans, Venetians, and Balkan nations throughout their history shaped their worldview beyond just their political situation. I also thought it could have used more discussion of the Greek economy, beyond just saying at various points that it was too dependent on one or two export crops, which seemed a bit simplistic of an assessment. Like I said though, if you're looking for a good overview that can give you a fairly reasonable sense of where Greece has been and how it got to where it is now, at least from a geopolitical perspective, this is a decent book for that purpose.