What period in history fascinates you the most?

[CorneliaSt]

My degree was in history (special subject was the French Revolution) but it seems like a lifetime ago. I can barely remember any of it so it's my new year's resolution to start reading more and hauling the old knowledge out.

I'm as fascinated with WW2 as I ever was as a geeky child, but I also particularly enjoy Renaissance history and a good old king and queen story.

If you have any book recommendations that would be great.

The Belle Époque (late 19th and early 20th C). I love the idea of living in Paris then.

WW2 always fascinated me as a child. When I was about 12, my English class were studying a novel set during the war. The teacher asked us to raise our hands if we’d like to have lived during WW2. Weirdly, most of us put our hands up.

I'm mainly interested in social and political history, and am not interested in anything pre-Georgian usually. In order of preference:

Interwar years (so 1918 to 1939) (I find this period absolutely fascinating)
Edwardian
Victorian (love all the political and social upheaval)
Georgian (mainly because of Jane Austen and wanting to know the context)

1930s and 40s.

I love Russian history too. Russian Revolution being the obvious thing, but I'd be quite interested in going back a bit further, although I haven't read much before about 1905. That's a gap in my knowledge...

Tudors
The Roaring Twenties - Art Deco, fabulous clothes
Victorian

The plague times.
German colonial period in South pacific

Book recs -

• Bluestockings - history of women's higher education is a great pop-history read
• Life in Squares - history of women in Bloomsbury Square (Virginia Woolf etc)
• The Third Reich trilogy on the development of Nazism by Richard J. Evans. Fascinating and fairly heavy look at how Germany went from the liberalities of the Weimar Republic to Nazism in such a short period, and then WW2, then collapse.
• Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel is an interesting and entertaining read covering all sort of developments over human history.
• We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars is excellent and very interesting as well as entertaining.

I'm currently reading Travellers in the Third Reich - letters home from non-German travellers visiting Germany in the 1930s and writing home their observations about life there under Hitler, before, of course, most of them really grasped how awful it was.

20th century. ..especially (but not only) both world wars.

Ancient Egypt and Victorian times for me.

Thank you WeirdlyOdd!

I'm so looking forward to this. I've not read properly in far too long.

Wars of the Roses
Rise of the Nazis
French Revolution (well, mainly I read A Place Of Greater Safety )

Might do Charles I and II next.

Tudor - full of interesting characters and politics.
The War of the Roses - all the politics and changes of power, leading to the Tudor era.

It was definitely a man's world but there were several very strong and interesting women, they had to be extra tough and extra crafty to survive.

The English Civil War and the Restoration, particularly Charles II, again full of interesting (and flamboyant) characters.

I am a fan of the european reformation and I would also love to know more about the social history of mid 20th century USA, but struggle to find anything to read on the subject that isn't written with a really blatant bias- maybe it's just to recent? All those tv programs we watched growing up Taxi, The Dukes of Hazard and the Littlest Hobo they painted a scary picture to me of a place where you could count on anyone not to beat the crap out of you.

DH is v into Wellington, might try a brief history of Trafalgar. Am currently trying to get into Georgette Heyer's An Infamous Army, which they read at Sandhurst apparently.

anything about the Russian empire!

Tudors.

I find the medieval period fascinating. The Dark Ages. Dark monasteries providing a glimmer of (Christian) light against the shortness and brutality of so many lives. Paganism. Given how so many of the late medieval ways of living, deep in our rural countryside, had echoes way into the C20, prior to WW1, and how that changed so much.

There is the footprint of an Iron Age village in the woods 200m from me. I often wonder about their lives.

So many typos.

None of the eras when effluent flowed freely through the streets

I did Classical Civilisation for my degree and enjoyed the history but also the minutiae of the daily life.

I also love the industrial revolution.

I'm now fascinated by 20th Century world history, probably because it's just becoming out of reach now. So much changed in such a short space of time.

The cold war

The dark ages/medieval England for me, though it has to be said that I wouldn't want to live there; I very much appreciate modern medicine, female emancipation and a washing machine!

The Renaissance and the 1960s as a general era!
Clearly a fan of fashion and style overhauls

Elizabethan times, discovery of the New World, the Spanish Armada and all that.