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recent history (4)
past in pictures (4)
longer ago (7)
history of clothes (3)
18 books
last updated November 2019
What do I know about this?
The present you live in will be the past soon - you are living in history. Other people will read about now and say 'wow, did they really live like that?'
Remember that when you read about the past. Those people were just like you — except that some of them wore a coat made of fish skins and the 'cure' for most illnesses was having your blood sucked out by leeches. Ugh.
The last century sounds like history, doesn't it? We could even call it the last millennium to make sound longer ago. These books look at recent events. The first two take a more serious view than the last, which is more concerned with boy bands and computer games.
Rachel Carson (Salariya, 2019)
She spotted the effects of global warming on the oceans 70 years ago and started the environmental movement with her fight to ban thoughtless use of dangerous pesticides. A hero of our time.
A Place in History: The Berlin Wall (Franklin Watts, 2011)
From the 1950s to 1990, Europe was divided into East and West. And Berlin was half in one and half in the other, soon divided by a wall that cut the city in half. Anyone crossing the wall was shot. Sounds like a dystopian novel, doesn't it. But it's real history.
Dates of a Decade: The 1990s (Franklin Watts, 2009)
A lot happened in the 1990s, including the worldwide web and cloning.
Zigga Zagga Know it All (Chrysalis, 2002)
The 90s weren't all websites and wars. There were also the Spice Girls and Neopets - really important stuff.
We don't learn history just from written records. We can also learn a lot from looking at pictures. Of course, we can't look at photographs of Romans and dinosaurs - we can only go so far back. These books show how four major cities have changed over 100 years or so, by putting photos of the same place at different times side by side.
Cities Through Time series: Paris, New York, London, Los Angeles (Chrysalis, 2005)
Stone Age to Iron Age Britain; Sumerian Civilisation; Anglo-Saxons and Vikings; Crime and Punishment in Britain (Badger Learning, 2015)
Surgery Through Time (HarperCollins, Big Cat, 2013)
This will just make you glad you live now instead of then.
Take Me Back (Dorling Kindersley, 2008)
From ancient times to now, with every page having a very visual and unique design ranging from comic strip to Bauhaus poster.
Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (Marshall Cavendish, 2005) 12 vols
As I said, I didn't write all of it...
Somehow I wandered into this little niche of history of costume. It's great fun - jackets made of salmon skin, vests made of rice fibre. You can't get those from Primark. (Or maybe you can...)
The Eighteenth Century (Facts on File, 2005)
The 1950s and 1960s (Chelsea House, 2009)
Costume Around the World: China (Chelsea House, 2008)
Do you want to find out about the way we live? There are books about:
>> technostuff
There are also books for grownups about the history of science. These are not too hard if you are 12+