Author: Tim Graczewski
-
Seven Centuries of Art: Survey and Index (1970) by H.W. Janson et al.
Seven Centuries of Art: Survey and Index, the capstone volume of the classic Time-Life Library of Art, is best understood as a grand connective tissue – an effort to show how Western art evolved not as a sequence of isolated geniuses, but as a long conversation across time. Rather than focusing on the twenty-eight individual…
-
The First Frontier: Life in Colonial America (1966) by John C. Miller
John C. Miller’s The First Frontier: Life in Colonial America (1966) is a tightly argued synthesis that reframes early American history by shifting attention away from elites, institutions, and ideology toward ordinary life on the colonial frontier. Its originality lies more in emphasis and perspective than in overturning established interpretations. Americans have always put a…
-
Wilderness At Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent (1993) by Ted Morgan
French-American biographer, journalist, and historian Ted Morgan was born Count Sanche Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont in Geneva in 1932. He became an American citizen in 1977, renouncing his French noble titles and adopting the Americanized name “Ted Morgan,” an anagram of “de Gramont.” His 91-year life was a full one – ranging from service…
-
The World of Dürer: 1471-1528 (1967) by Francis Russell
Born the son of a Nuremberg goldsmith, Albrecht Dürer learned the demanding art of engraving with a burin at an early age, a discipline that trained both his hand and his eye. His talent was quickly recognized, and he was apprenticed to the painter Michael Wolgemut, who would become a second father and introduce him…
-
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) by Peter Frankopan
Western civilization – and, by extension, much of world history – is often presented as a seamless chain of causally linked events stretching back to antiquity. In its simplest form, the narrative runs like this: Ancient Greece gave rise to Imperial Rome; Rome shaped Christian Europe; Christian Europe produced the Renaissance, which sparked the Enlightenment…
-
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) by Sean Wilentz
Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy (2005) is an ambitious work of U.S. political history. It is a dense but readable and deeply researched account of how democratic politics took shape from the age of the Revolution through the Civil War. At nearly a thousand pages, the book is far more than…
-
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011) by Charles C. Mann
In 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011), Charles C. Mann examines how the voyages of Columbus set in motion one of the most transformative events in human history – the creation of the Homogocene, a truly globalized, borderless world. Building on the foundation of his earlier work 1491 (2005) and Arthur Crosby’s seminal…
-
The World of Titian: 1488-1576 (1968) by Jay Williams
Titian – born Tiziano Vecellio in a small village in the Dolomites northeast of Venice – was the most prominent, versatile, and long-lived of all sixteenth-century Venetian artists. He arrived in Venice in 1497 as a nine-year-old apprentice, when the city was still at the height of its economic and cultural power and its art…
-
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (1998) by David S. Landes
When David Landes published The Wealth and Poverty of Nations in 1998, he entered one of the most enduring debates in world history: why some societies become rich while others remain poor. Landes’s answer was simple and blunt: “If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the…
What's Tim Reading Now? 