I just started reading a book on the Russian Revolution, but wanna read more leftist history. Anything from revolutions and labor movements to biographies. Doesn't matter to me if it's written by a Marxist historian, I just wanna read some good history books.
A people's history of the French Revolution is fun.
October by China Meiville as well.
I've looking into the Annales School and World Systems Theory. Neither are specifically socialist, but they seem more materialist than some other schools of history.
The Annales school (French pronunciation: [a'nal]) is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century to stress long-term social history. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and monographs.[1] The school has been highly influential in setting the agenda for historiography in France and numerous other countries, especially regarding the use of social scientific methods by historians, emphasizing social and economic rather than political or diplomatic themes.
World-systems theory (also known as world-systems analysis or the world-systems perspective)[1] is a multidisciplinary, macro-scale approach to world history and social change which emphasizes the world-system (and not nation states) as the primary (but not exclusive) unit of social analysis.
Right now I'm reading Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century trilogy and Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century.
Yeah, annales is great if merged with explicitly Marxist historical approaches.
i've been meaning to read Wallerstein's Modern World-Systems series or a while now, but it's definitely a bit more academic then what i'm used to.
Eric Hobsbawm’s books were recommended to me, in particular the “Age of ...” trilogy. It’s general western history for the most part, going from the French Revolution on. From what I remember, I’d say the books focus on the feedback loop between material conditions and historical events—or at least spend much more time giving a sense of material conditions, compared to other history books.
I listened to the first and part of the second at work, since my local library partnered with something called Hoopla and I could stream the audiobooks from the app.
documentaries too preferably!! i want a china or ussr history doc but they are all shit
if you want to know more about the mexican revolution, Frank McLynn's Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution is a good read.
