Below is a list of books that I heartily recommend in their entirety. I have taken excerpts from a couple of them, but their best parts are lost out of context.
You will not find any hyperlinks to online booksellers; my purpose here is education and enjoyment. I instead recommend your local public library. What books they do not have they can borrow for you via Interlibrary Loan (ILL).
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara W. Tuchman.
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War by Robert K. Massie.
Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century by Norman F. Cantor.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen.
Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic (Revised) by Isaac Bonewits.
Saladin In His Time by P. H. Newby.
The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Karen Armstrong.
The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels by Thomas Cahill.
The Mask of Command by John Keegan.
The Quest for El Cid by Richard Fletcher.
The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History by Philip Bobbitt.
Zen in the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams.
