Favorite period? Now? As a kid?

galanx

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I'm a newbie, so I'm sure this must have been done, but what's your favorite period? Now? As a kid?

My interest was always ancient/classical, extending from "cavemen" but coming to a screeching halt at the onset of the medieval. I could stretch it up to the Norman Conquest, but that was it.

These days, I can read anything that's good 'g Flashman, , but the mists of time still draw me back.

My favorites as a kid were
The Great Axe Bretwalda: Alfred the Great vs. the Danes
The Year of the Horsetails: Huns vs Slavs in the Central Eurasian steppes
The Hills of Varna: okay, it's Renaissance, but concerns Classical Greece: young Englishman dispatched by Erasmus to find ancient Athenian comedy "The Gadfly", hidden in a monastery in the Balkans . The prequel deals with the actual writing of the play and politics in ancient Athens- both are very Whiggish, pro-democracy and liberalism, Varna stereotypes obscurantist Medieval monks.
 
450AD to 1200 AD Ireland
Elizabethan (Elisabeth I or a bit earlier) to Edwardian (really 1914 though he died in 1910) or even 1939.
1700s to early 1900s are fascinating for technology.

Rome older Chinese, Greek, Scandinavian and Celtic stories, the exact period can be vague.
 
I never liked history much as a kid - I liked some of the imagery, but got bored by lists of kings that underpinned the political history we were taught at school.

What I love now is living history - how ordinary people got by in the world. I'm interested in any period up to around 1650 - possibly because rural living changed very little until then. After that date, though, you start to hit the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution which changed everything for everyone.
 
I never liked history much as a kid - I liked some of the imagery, but got bored by lists of kings that underpinned the political history we were taught at school
I liked the bits that weren’t that. I had the UK school history lessons. My children suffered the Irish school ones, which have different tedious obsessions to the UK Tudors etc.
I enjoyed 1066 and all that as a kid.
 
As a kid - knights in armour / soldiers in armour. So that would be the middle ages and the Romans.

Now - probably The Second World War. Its current enough to still be affecting the lives of living people.
 
I guess I've always been taken with Ancient Greece and Rome. I remember drawing pictures of gods and goddesses and making lists of their names across the different cultures. And now my favorite historical fiction is about Rome.
 
making lists of their names across the different cultures.
I think I saw your table on Wikipedia earlier today.

Julius Caesar did that. In fact he neglected to tell us what the "locals" really called their gods. Since the Roman ones pretty much match the Greek ones (other than name) he seems to have assumed that's how it "really" works. Except of course as you got farther from Greece & Roman culture it became less true.
Some of the gods of Egyptian, Canaanite/Phoenetian, Babylonian, Insular Celts, Central Europe Celts, Gaulish Celts, Scandinavians and Teuton/Germanic do "match" with each other, or gradually become similar. Others certainly aren't. :D
 
Personally I'm a huge fan of ancient Egypt, as a kid I wanted to be an egyptologist but realized it would never work. I most definitely wasn't opening any tombs lol.
 
As a kid it was definitely knights in armor. Me and my brother used to run around with wooden swords made by our grandfather, great times.

Later I got really into cowboys, I remember watching a lot of old westerns on TV, and we had those toy guns with small gunpowder charges that went off as you pulled the trigger.

As a teenager I read a lot of fantasy so I kind of got away from real history for a while.

Now I couldn't tell you what my favorite period is, there's just too many to choose from, though at the moment I'm pretty into feudal Japan (Sengoku period). Unfortunately there isn't much fiction covering that period (at least in English).
 
Ancient and medieval times to me. Just imagine all those ancient empires we know nearly nothing about except a few pillars or so. Their citizens thought their religion and their states will last forever like we do right now. Now we sometimes do not even know its names.
 
Ancient History and up to Medieval times were also my favourite study subjects as a boy. I didn't enjoy Victorian and 20th century at all though now I find that reasonably interesting too. Castles and life revolving around castles was my first love. The saddest thing about now living in Canada is the distinct, but understandable, lack of castles.
 
I live in Europe. I see two castles just from my window. Now a heavy castles season starts and there are so many events connected to castles, fencing, night castle/chateau trips etc. I cannot wait for holidays.
 
Same here. Can hardly move without tripping over a Norman castle. Our house sits right under the walls of one and is clearly built (1750s) from the castle stones.

Give me late Victorian or Edwardian any day.
 
Ancient stuff, Greece, Rome, Carthage, and, more recently, medieval England and the Eastern Roman Empire.

Can't really remember what I was into as a child. Probably Vikings and the Napoleonic Wars. Boney was no match for a British footwear designer.
 
My first favorite time period when I was younger (few years ago) was Midwest America in the middle to late 1800's. My favorite book then was little house in the Prairie so my first books were typically in a similar setting and time period. I then grew a liking of the time period 19th century west coast after I read island of the blue dolphins with after that my focus going on books about the traditional people of California and the spanish inhabiting the region. My favorite time period generally now is 1800's mid west and coast,parts owned by Mexico before the Mexican cession.
 
Childhood - Colonial America, Civil War era, and the 50s.
Teen - World War II, the American south during reconstruction, and the roaring 20s.
Adulthood - history of religion, the Renaissance, still World War II, the American west from 1865 to 1910, and a dabbling in World War I.
 
Maybe the Victorian period and up into the pre-War years. Immediately intelligible language (English), lots of my favorite reading for sure, recognizable historical events (whereas for me something like the Peloponnesian War is little more than a term), etc., and yet certainly different from our own time. This interest began when I had early intense reading experiences with Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger, M. R. James's ghost stories, and Wells's early science fiction, etc., followed by further reading in Victorian-Edwardian authors, both genre (Rider Haggard, W. H. Hodgson, Arthur Machen, &c) and mainstream (Hawthorne, Poe, Melville; Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol; Dickens, Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, the Brontës, &c).

What's Your Golden Age?

It's a very interesting historical period, both conservative and progressive, both stable and unstable, altruistic and exploitative, agrarian and technological, etc. It is the age of Darwin and the age of the Tractarians. It was an age when one could still just disappear and start over, or rescue an orphan off the street and bypass the government (cf. Oliver Twist). It was an age of diarists, photographs, and painting. The erotic was often channeled in productive ways rather than being dissipated and endlessly commercialized as in our time. It was an age of big families and interesting childhoods -- look at what they wrote, my word! It was an age of emigration and of travel books. It was a modern age, with steamships and railroad, but it was also one in which many people walked to get where they needed to go. Nature was increasingly cherished thanks, in part, to the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth. Historical consciousness -- the sense that the past was a different place -- become a common possession, thanks in part to the romances of Sir Walter Scott. Books became much more widely available thanks to the circulating libraries and cheap printing. Fortunes were made and speculators lost fortunes. I take it that considerable parts of Europe were still more or less wilderness. It was the first scientistic age, giving a (pseudo) scientific basis for racism for the first time in history. It was the period in which serfdom (Russia 1861) and slavery (US 1865) were abolished, and of disgraces like the Opium War and the suppression of American Indian lifeways. These things and much more make it an interesting period to read about, with things to celebrate and to deplore.

I find I'm getting interested in the 17th century too -- the age of Milton &c.

These of course are Anglophone-centric comments, but I don't apologize for that. After all, it is probably too late for me to decide I am going to become similarly conversant with, say, the Ming dynasty.
 

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