For the French Revolution, I prefer the late Francois Furet's Revolutionary France: 1770-1880 to Schama.  If anyone wants a little historiography to go along with their history, Furet's Interpreting the French Revolution would do nicely as well.

For ancient history, it's hard to do better than Thucydides or Gibbon, as others have already said.  I also enjoy Arrian on Alexander the Great and, to pick a modern author, almost anything by Peter Brown on late antiquity.   If I had to chose, I'd go with Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity or the collection of essays, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity.  For those new to the period, his more popular work, The World of Late Antiquity, 150-750, may be of more interest.  All are beautifully written, and the last has many terrific photographs of late Roman and early Christian art.

Final recommendations, to get away from the political or social history side: Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages.  Two classic works that deserve to be read again and again.   Oh heck, one more: a masterful look at how historians through the modern era approached art and artefacts as evidence, Francis Haskell's History and Its Images.  As with the Peter Brown, there's a heavy debt here to the work of Arnaldo Momgliano.

Posted at June 10, 2005 4:36 PM in response to More History Books