The Well-Educated Mind: Reading The Histories

Ruth at A Great Book Study is beginning to read through The Well-Educated Mind Histories beginning January 1, 2017 and I'm going to join her on the journey.  We read through the Biographies together (or almost. I still have The Gulag Archipelago to finish up) and while it took two and a half years, it seems just like yesterday that we began.

Now, I'm under no illusions; the histories are going to take longer, especially if one wants to really absorb them.  Here is the list:

• The Histories by Herodotus
• The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
• The Republic by Plato
• Plutarch’s Lives
• The City of God by St. Augustine
• The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Utopia by Sir Thomas More
• The True End of Civil Government by John Locke
• The History of England, Vol. V by David Hume
• The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
• Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville
• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
• The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
• The Souls of Black Folk by W.E. B. Du Bois
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
• Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey
• The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
• The New England Mind by Perry Miller
• The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
• The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan
• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
• Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman
• All the President's Men by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson
• A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
• The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

Some of these I'm so excited to read, such as The Histories, The Republic, The Prince, The Social Contract, and A Distant Mirror; others leave me rather unmoved, for example, The True End of Civil Government (big yawn!), Common Sense and The Feminine Mystique.  I expect to have some surprise favourite and flops before the read is over.

There is also a Reading the Histories group on Goodreads where we'll be able to discuss as we go.  So please join us if you feel so inclined and we can read the histories together.  You never know where they may take us!