With some suprise, the history books I've been leafing through have sustained my interest and curiosity.  When I was young, even in high school, history lessons felt like more of a chore - something you had to wade through to move onto the next thing: maybe because of how it was taught, or maybe it was my teachers.  History is a difficult subject in general.  Hence, I imagine it's difficult to teach.  What do you teach and why?  From which perspective, and why?  How much detail do we want to cover?  Some topics have mountains of primary evidence and sources (Ancient Rome) whereas others have much less to go on (Native American tribes).  In this sense, whatever we teach or learn from history is alway going to be fraught with <missing item>, cultural interprations, political biases, and the worst of all, in my view:  propaganda campaigns.  

Progaganda isn't a modern phenomonen, either.  We like to think that Operation Mockingbird, and the like, are only contemporary adjuncts to large bureaucratic governemnts to keep the official narrative within their grasp, but any history scholar knows this isn't true - nor should we.  History isn't necessarily written by the victors, but it's most definetly written by people with subjective worldviews, religious practices, and political ideals.  In other words, our understanding of history is only as good as our sources, and it's only as broad as how many different ones we read.  This underlines part of my overall goal with the History section in the Letters to Logos project.  In other words:  Read a whole lot of famous history works from different eras and perspectives, and if they don't fit here, put them in the Miscellanous section.  At worst, I'll become a radical bigot, or bewildered by the very rotatoin of the Earth.  At best, the patterens of civilization and the human condition will emerge with more clarity by the pages on hand.  

As a preamble, and to prepare for some of the more dense later works, I've included some popular "history" overviews.  These are books that touch on many of the major events and topics over the course of our known human civiliation worldwide.  With the exception of A Brief History of Time and A Short History of Nearly Everything  - which focus more on science and physics - the other history books I've read so far cover broad periods of human civilition.  A Little History of the World, by E.H. Gombrich fits into this latter category covering major civilations and events in history with brevity and clarity.

Gombrich begins his survery with a brief overview of early prehistoric groups and cave paintings, summarizing the Ice Age epoch with: "The Ice Age lasted for an unimgianably long time.  Many tens of thousands of years, which was just as well, for otherwise people would not have had time to invent all these things."  The other details on this imaginanably long period of ice ages and interstadials - when humans were more or less the species we are now - are sparse on unexplored.  The focus of Gombrich's history isn't on this immense unknown period, precisley because there simply isnt't a lot of evidence, but I still wonder, often, if the story of our distant past is far more complicated and interesting than we can imagine.  The pyramids and Great Sphinx are great examples of this curios ambiguity, but that's a topic for a different essay.

For the purposes of our known history, and what it generally accepted as the beginning of human civilization, starts in ancient Egypt and the Fertile Crescent around what is modern day Iraq.  Gombrich expounds on the different dynasties that emerged and fell around the Nile over thousands of years.  An interesting point that is lost of many people is how far the Egyptian dynstaies go back in time.  The oldest known dynstasy if further away from Cleaopatra than Cleaopatra is from today.  During the Egyptians dynsta