It sounds like you might dig Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner. A lot of what he wrote is heavily contested. I don't know enough to evaluate those claims.

You can understand both good and bad reasons why he would have errors. The CIA's work is classified a lot of times, so he had to piece the stories together indirectly. So mistakes are understandable. If the criticism of bias is more accurate that's a different issue, but you'd have to read reviews of his book and probably read a lot to get an idea of how much bias has had an impact.

I felt the same about the MacMillan book. It made a bunch of Best of 20XX lists so my expectations were probably too high. But I felt like it'd be good for someone maybe taking their first college level world history course.

I'd probably start with Battle Cry Freedom by James McPherson.

It covers the whole war. It's really well written so it carries you along and is as enjoyable as such a topic can be. It covers the major events without being overwhelming and is a good book for getting a big picture view of the different campaigns. There are about a million copies floating around so finding it at the library or used won't be difficult. And even though it's somewhat dated, it was much better about avoiding Lost Cause stuff than Foote.

Dr. Hilary Green's on twitter and as long as your polite she's usually pretty helpful. She's got a book coming out soon so she's pretty busy right now, but it's probably worth asking her. https://twitter.com/HilaryGreen77

I would check out Joshua Farrington's book, Black Republicans. You can hear an interview with him on the New Books Network. Although not exactly what you're asking it traces the same historical trends and events. The story it covers is that after 1880 the GOP was less invested in Black Americans and as Black Americans immigrated to the north, especially after the boll weevil infestation, the urban Democratic party machine saw that they could be part of a useful urban coalition. There's starts and stops to this (think Wilson and then FDR), but once Truman had integrated the military, the Dems were locked into the civil rights path. This created an opportunity for the GOP to start poaching white working class dems in the south. Barry Goldwater tested this unsuccessfully, but Nixon perfected it's dog whistles and subtext in what came to be known as the Southern Strategy. On top of that you have things like the Chicago Campaign by MLK that failed and William F. Buckley's campaign for Mayor NYC which showed the GOP how to use the strategy in the industrial north too.

There's a good book by Nick Buccola called The Fire Is Upon Us about James Baldwin and William F. Buckley that gets into Buckley's tactics in NYC. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/books/review/the-fire-is-upon-us-nicholas-buccola.html

https://newbooksnetwork.com/joshua-d-farrington-black-republicans-and-the-transformation-of-the-gop-u-pennsylvania-press-2016

Edit: I'll also throw in Mothers of Conservatism by Michelle Nickerson. It gets into how fears of integration in places like Orange County lead to kind of a intellectual and activist powerhouse among upper middle class white women that helped push people like Nixon and Reagan who made use of the Southern Strategy and fears of "communism" to fight civil rights and how they became the base of the GOP.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/michelle-nickerson-mothers-of-conservatism-women-and-the-postwar-right-princeton-up-2012

To echo the Andrew Roberts rec, I'll throw in that Roberts did a list over at Fivebooks.com about the 5 best books on Napoleon. It's definitely worth a read. https://fivebooks.com/best-books/napoleon-andrew-roberts/

I'm reading Latin American Indigenous Violence and Ritual Warfare right now. It's edited by Ruben Mendoza and Richard Chacon. I've only got a couple chapters left, but so far the best chapter has been on how difficult it is to get any good information about actual sacrificial practices of the groups in the central Mexico valley. There's another good chapter on Mayan warfare and how study of the subject is limited by a lack of knowledge of the political conditions in southern Mexico/Central America.

A lot of the book is dedicated to South American groups and there's a chapter on ritual fighting in Take The Square events at the end of June. The authors did a good job of tying the ritual back to pre-Columbian rituals. But most of the South American chapters are about tribal raiding which I don't find super interesting.

Overall, I'd say maybe check it out if its handy if you're really interested in this stuff, otherwise, maybe just read chapters on specific groups you're interested in.

I don't know how in depth it has to be, but it might be fun to compare UK policy in China during the Opium Wars vs. US policy in Japan and how they shaped each other.

You could also do a compare and contrast of US and UK policy in some other colonial context like Liberia vs. Sierra Leone and how UK emancipation differed from US emancipation and colonization scheme.

I think this is probably one of those things where it appears something is the case b/c attention is focused there rather than somewhere else. LA has a big media industry and people looking for stories. So, there's a lot of resources already looking for something novel. On top of that people who are looking for attention purposely go there b/c of the potential of gaining that attention. None of that is going on in rural Utah. But anyone who's been out to rural Utah can tell you it's full of all sorts of weird off shoots of the LDS/Mormons.

And if your cult is doing something like having child brides/polygamy/something else of questionable legality, you probably don't want people to notice or be a member.

So, this may just be a perception and not have any basis of fact.

Also, b/c a cult isn't really an objective thing, mostly just a pejorative term used for groups that are found to be weird, it's incredibly hard to quantify.

But I would think, just based on what I've seen, is that there are more cults in places like Utah, where a religion is fairly new and has a culture of "prophets" that allow lots of splits, or places like West Virginia where specific communities are fairly isolated geographically and can develop in idiosyncratic ways b/c of that isolation.

There's a book called War Lovers about how politicians like Teddy Roosevelt and Hearst worked together to drum up support for an expeditionary war against Spain.

There was also a book a few years ago called Confronting Imperialism that was a collection of essays on The Anti-Imperial League which opposed Hearst and Roosevelt's march to war. The members of the group included notable folks like Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie (this is was one of the key events that pushed him to create the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) and Helen Keller.

It was also supposed to create an economic sphere to rival the common market in western Europe. It didn't really work well at that. But part of the reason for it was so that the USSR could offer something in place of the Marshall plan money that the USSR was forcing those countries to turn down.
Tony Judt's book, Postwar, does a good job of covering it, but it covers pretty much everything during the postwar period so it's a pretty weighty tome. But it's one of the best history books I've ever read.

Sounds like it's time to get a library card. A librarian can also help you structure searches so you can find more sources. And a library is probably going to have access to databases like JSTOR so you can look for papers.

Yeah, there's a lot more to history. Most good history books, even if they're focusing on something like war, are going to talk about the politics, economics, technology and infrastructure/logistics of the situation. Those questions are usually more important than the war itself b/c the cause of the war and the resolution are tied up in those factors.

If you look at something like Ukraine's fight today, the explanation for tactics are intricately tied to global supply and politics. Why Russia lost so many tanks has to do with their politics and economic situation. You need to have some idea of those things to understand what is going on and it's no different in the past.

Have you read the Nigel Jones book yet? It's only about 300 pages and is a reasonable place to start. It's only about 15 years old so it's fairly up to date.

I took a stab at Douglas Brinkley's Silent Spring Revolution. It's not really a topic I'm interested in. I'm not anti environmentalist or anything silly, it's just a big topic and I always felt like I could either learn a lot about 2 or 3 other topics or spend as much time and learn a little bit about environmentalism. So, this wasn't exactly the most interesting thing to me. I had to read it for a book club. I only made it about 2/3s of the way through, but it's about 700 pages before you get to the notes.

So, for something I don't really love, it drew me in for a good 400 pages. If the history of environmentalism is important to you this is a good book. Brinkley is a great writer, I loved his book on Katrina. I can't say I really learned a lot though, maybe b/c the history is so recent. It was within the common memory while I was growing up that lakes and rivers were full of pollution and human shit and would catch fire and cause outbreaks and that the air was awful. I remember whole months where it was so bad that visibility was measured less than a football field.

So I think maybe people born in the 80s or later would get more out of it. If you are interested in the history of the environmental movement in the US after WWII then I would definitely recommend this.

Like /u/MeatballDom points out, history moves more through Kuhnian shifts than Popperian revolutions. With that said, I think we're getting some exciting evidence that is pushing back the timeline of settlement in the Americas and if the evidence pans out and we find more, it could be a big shift.

Also, with new technologies like Lidar we're finding out more about settlement patterns and urbanization. It sees that we had underestimated the size of population centers throughout the Americas. Combined with the earlier settlement info, we might very well increase estimates of the populations of the Americas at the time of settlement from about 40ish million, which is kind of the standard right now, to one of the higher end estimate ranges.

But it's not a sudden shift. People have been arguing this for decades and slowly building and examining an evidentiary record for these theories.

I think just the fundamental argument of the book is important b/c Diamond made the same mistake in GG&S about how societies actually exist. They don't just suddenly disappear. They are constantly adapting and changing. The Conquest of Mexico didn't happen in the short time span Diamond portrayed it as happening, it took hundreds of years, fighting was ongoing in the Yucatan until the 20th century and the state still has issues with control there and in Chiapas and the hills of Oaxaca. He takes the same kind of assumptions throughout Collapse and they just don't pan out when you look at the peoples who these experts still are working with, even though they are supposed to have "disappeared."

Unless you were extremely blind, before the industrial age it wasn't all that important. You don't need to see all that great to plow a furrow or swing a scythe or to watch for stray animals, etc. Most people didn't read very much, if at all. If you couldn't see well you wouldn't be apprenticed into a trade where it mattered if you weren't a farmer, and most people were farmers.

I don't normally recommend David Graeber's book, Debt. But this is one topic that it was actually really good on. It talks about the way people traded when money was scarce, which is most of human history in most places.

There's a lot of valid criticism of the book so I would maybe check out the wikipedia entry on it to get the outlines of the debate and to help read it critically b/c Graeber is a great writer and he's can be very convincing if you're only getting his side of the story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

I would check out Richard Evan's Pursuit of Power. It covers the period from the end of the Napoleonic wars until the beginning of the WWI. It covers the major trends, politics, intellectual, and scientific history of the period.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529358/the-pursuit-of-power-by-richard-j-evans/

There's a good paper on the NIH's site about this. Abscessed teeth was an incredibly deadly condition. The paper cites evidence from the 1500s that put it as the 5th or 6th leading cause of death. Basically if you didn't get the tooth removed and cleaned early, it was a serious life threatening condition.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10686905/

So, this is a fringe theory from the late 1800s that Mormons basically made up out of whole cloth to show that the Book of Mormon had some historical basis. It was never taken seriously outside those circles. When people started actually studying the genetics of Native American peoples and their languages it proved there's no evidence at all. All the genetic and linguistic evidence points back to the Altai mountain area.

You might find this paper and interview interesting: https://www.econtalk.org/omer-moav-on-the-emergence-of-the-state/

Paper: https://bse.eu/research/working-papers/cereals-appropriability-and-hierarchy

It talks about how the development of cereal grains can have an impact on state formation. I don't fully buy into it b/c it seems a little too deterministic, but it's definitely an interesting idea.

If you read the Diamond book, you should also read Questioning Collapse where various experts in the fields Diamond looks at in Collapse explain the mistakes he makes.

I think the main issue is they just don't have enough examples of it. So it's mostly looking for more of it, hopefully with either new symbols or in different arrangements or with some kind of context clue.

There's a fun book about the translation of Linear B by Margalit Fox called the Riddle of the Labyrinth. It shows what what kind of volume of symbols is needed to account for things like if the writing is gendered or to account for different people's writing styles.