国王学院本科生书单

History reading list
We are looking forward to welcoming you at King's. Meanwhile you may be wondering how best to
continue your studies until you come up.
This is an ideal time to enlarge your general reading, both in history and in other fields. You will find
various suggestions about reading in the list below. Do not be alarmed by its size. No-one will
expect you to have read more than whatever may seem interesting and relevant to your initial choice
of papers over the course of the year. Do, however, bear in mind the need to begin thinking about
general questions of method and historical interpretation. In this connection, the selection of books
suggested in the last section of this list contain items that should complement your reading around
particular periods or themes.
As you know, you will be able to study a language in your first year, either from scratch or building on
what you have done at either GCSE or A level (or equivalent). This is something we strongly
encourage. To enable me to fix up language teaching, please could you write and tell me by 1 May
2012 which language you would like to study (French, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Russian) and
the level you have reached (zero, GCSE or A level).
When you come into residence you will be told in detail about the history course. You can get an
idea of what it consists of from the enclosed copy of the Faculty prospectus, which may help you to
get a rough idea of what the study of history involves. The best way to find things out is to look at the
History Faculty website.
In your first term here you will be studying the political and constitutional history of one of the five
specified periods of British history (detailed in Section B of the page entitled 'Historical Tripos Part
I). I should like to know by 1 May 2012 at the latest, which of the five periods in British political
history you want to study and also which language you wish to study. I also need to know the names
and numbers of the periods of British Economic and Social History and European History that you
would like to take in the Lent and Easter terms. You can find these too on the History Faculty
website.
It is probably better to take the European History paper in the Lent term and the Economic and
Social History paper in the Easter term. It is also worth thinking about taking parallel papers in
British political and British economic and social history. Without this information I cannot arrange
supervisions for you when you arrive in October. In case you should want to do some reading in
order to get an impression of a period with which you are not familiar, please find below a short list
of introductory books.
If you have any queries about this or any other matter, don't hesitate to contact me:
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Director of Studies in History, contact details. 
English History; suggested introductory reading
(Select a period according to your interests)
 
Medieval
S Reynolds: Kingdoms and Communities
J C Schmitt: The Holy Greyhound
J Holt: Robin Hood
F Barlow: The Feudal Kingdoms of England 1047-1216
D Douglas: The Norman Achievement
D Douglas: William the Conquerer:The Norman Impact on England
R Hilton: Bondmen Made Free
G Holmes: The Later Middle Ages 1272-1485
J R Lander: Conflict and Stability in 15th Century England
R W Southern: The Making of the Middle Ages
A Gurevich: Categories of Popular Medieval Culture
S Shahar: The Fourth Estate: Women in the Middle Ages
Early Modern
C Russell: The Causes of the English Civil War
P Laslett: The World we have lost
J H Plumb: The Growth of Political Stability in England
J C D Clark: English Society 1688-1832
K Wrightson: English Society
J Brewer: The Sinews of Power
Modern
E P Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class
E J Hobsbawm: Industry and Empire
P Clarke: The Keynesian Revolution in the Making
P Clarke: Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900-1990
M. Desai: Marx's Revenge
Classical Narrative Histories
Gibbon: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Livy: Histories
Macaulay: History of England
Tacitus: Annals
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution
NB: You may not again have the leisure and inclination to read some of these, so you should
certainly do so now if possible.
Novels
Balzac: Lost Illusions
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Conrad: Nostromo
Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment;The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Henry James: The Bostonians
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward
Stendhal: The Red and the Black
Tolstoy: Anna Karenina;War and Peace
Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
Zola: Germinal
Studies of particular societies and epochs
Particularly useful for widening your sense of the range of historical enquiry:
 
J Bossy: Christianity in the West 1400 - 1700
F Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the World of Philip II
E Genovese: Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made
E Hobsdbawn: Primitive Rebels
J Levinson & F Schurmann: China: An Interpretative History
K Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic
E P Thompson: Whigs and Hunters
J Womack: Zapata and the Mexican Revolution
P Woodruff: The Men who ruled India
N Davis: Society and Culture in 18th Century France
C Ginzburg: The Cheese and the Worms
D MacCulloch: Reformation
Works of General Interest
Those marked with an asterisk will be particularly useful for thinking about general historical
problems:
 
N Bloch: The Historian's Craft
R G Collingwood: The Idea of History*
M Foucault: Madness and Civilisation*
E H Gombrich: Art and Illusion
C Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures*
J Keegan: The Face of Battle
G Lichtheim: Marxism
A D Lovejoy: The Great Chain of Being
A Macintyre: A Short History of Ethics
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities
Barrington Moore: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
W H Walsh: In Introduction to the Philosophy of History
Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*
J Tully & Q Skinner: Meaning and Context*
J Scott: Gender and the Politics of History
A Hirschman: The Passions and the Interests*
Reading lists | For offer holders | Undergraduate study