Bill P.

A cut above most Great Courses

Revisado: 03-06-22

I’ve listened to dozens of Great Courses, and I’m a university instructor myself. This is the first of Professor Daileader’s courses I’ve listened to. Daileader presents an overview of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages which is (1) shockingly easy to follow and understand; (2) evidence-based and rigorous; and (3) embedded in the context of the debate between two different schools of history on this era (the Gibbon and Perrin perspectives).

I really respect what Daileader accomplished with this course. It’s one of the very best Great Courses I’ve listened to.

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A good book, but not a great one

Revisado: 12-03-17

Full disclosure: Chernow's writing got me into history books years ago, and I've read his works on Washington and Hamilton.

Since then, I've specialized in 19th century American history, and I've read a few dozen works on that period, including (for example) Grant's and Sherman's autobiographies, from which Chernow draws heavily in this work.

As both a writer and as a historian, Chernow is good, but not great. Chernow's two main goals in this work are to rehabilitate Grant's reputation as an alcoholic and to rehabilitate Grant's presidency, and Chernow comes across very heavy-handed in both areas and sometimes makes dubious use of the available evidence. A secondary goal is to address Grant's reputation as a possible bigot, and although Chernow is a bit less heavy handed here, some of his excursions into Grant's psyche would have benefited from more judicious editing.

Overall, I did learn a lot from this book, and it was a worthwhile read. But it lacks the timelessness and poetry that the very best Civil War era works have. I don't see myself reading it a second time.

For the performance—it's good overall, but I noticed occasional mispronunciations, and I had to increase the playback speed significantly to find a comfortable pace.

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One of the finest Civil War books I've read

Revisado: 12-02-17

I was expecting this to be a possibly dry or mediocre book, but on the contrary, it excells nearly all other Civil War books I've read. Pullen had a true literary gift, and he deftly weaves primary sources into his own measured yet poetic prose.

On a personal note, one of my ancestors fought in the 20th Maine, in company F, and I was amazed by some of the terrible situations company F got into. Everyone knows about Little Round Top, but I had no idea company F was nearly annihilated in the Wilderness. Makes my skin crawl a little, reflecting on how I exist at all despite what my ancestor faced.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

A reasonable overview, but not very memorable

Revisado: 05-19-16

There are better single-volume histories of the Civil War than this. The strength of this course is that it supplements the historical narrative with plenty of modern statistics and analysis, which some authors fail to do. The course often "pauses" the narrative for chapters at a time to explore subtopics in depth through the lens of current scholarship. But this also leads to its weakness: the course ended up feeling like a somewhat disjointed encyclopedia about the war. I prefer more immersive narratives.

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A bit rushed and not particularly compelling

Revisado: 04-30-16

This survey of Roman history is competently arranged and executed, but rarely compelling. The end product feels too superficial and rushed. The lecturer has a habit of briefly mentioning topics nearly every episode and then saying "but we don't have time to talk about that"—a habit I've not noticed before in other Great Courses.

It's hard to articulate, but the course feels like it's geared toward students who have studied Latin, who know very little about Roman history, and who will be expected to do original research with primary sources in the future. For example, the lecturer regularly details what written evidence there is for a given era or topic, and he often highlights areas where he suggests more research should be done—the type of tone more typically taken in a graduate program, not a survey history course. It's not a bad approach, just one that isn't quite congruous with how most Great Courses work.

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