Unless you're just collecting names and dates, your genealogy research becomes richer the more you know about history, religion, and culture. Putting your ancestors in context not only helps you understand their lives within their own times, but gives you better direction on what to look for in sources and what to research next.
If you need a refresher, check out The Shortest History series published by The Experiment LLC. Current books in the series include Europe, England, Germany, Israel and Palestine, India, China, and Greece, with more in the works. Promoted as “Thousands of years of history. One riveting, fast-paced read,” the series is written by expert historians who are also international bestselling authors.
The title says it all: The Shortest History of Europe: How Conquest, Culture, and Religion Forged a Continent—A Retelling of Our Times. This is not a sprawling narrative filled with name-dropping and stringent timelines. Instead, John Hirst’s narrative explores how Greek and Roman learning, Christianity, and German warrior culture created modern Europe.
At first, it’s hard to absorb how only three elements determined the course of European history. But Hirst shows how all the monumental events happened because of conquest, culture, and religion.
For example, the Catholic Church banished or executed great thinkers like Copernicus and Galileo because their interpretations of how the universe worked contradicted the Greco-Roman view. Martin Luther and his followers wanted to return Christianity to its basic form—the Bible—without the Greco-Roman trappings and started the Reformation. Many years later, Isaac Newton and Einstein explained their scientific discoveries by following the Greek theory that answers would be “simple, mathematical, and logical.”
Throughout the book and its many revolutions, Hirst synthesizes European history in a way that went beyond my college classes, yet is simple and accessible.
