Honestly, just start with Wikipedia. It's better than most popular books and completely free.

If you find yourself wanting something better, the next steps up are any of the numerous world history books from Oxford/Cambridge university presses. Beyond that you should really be picking more narrow areas/periods to go into.

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hagbard_c 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Wikipedia is emphatically not the place to start for this field. For chemistry, physics, mathematics and parts of biology, sure - any field which has not (yet) been politicised generally is covered quite well on Wikipedia. History has always been politicised and coverage of historical subjects on Wikipedia reflects and is fully dependent on which faction has captured the subject at hand. Even the ('perennial') sources allowed to be used on Wikipedia have been heavily politicised. If you want something resembling an objective take keep away from Wikipedia for anything which is in any way politically sensitive no matter whether you happen to agree to the factions which rule the roost or whether you oppose them. If you're looking for confirmation of your biases, sure go there but keep in mind that what you're reading there is not history but ideologically biased historical fiction.

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AlotOfReading 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The amount of politicization that happens on Wiki is vastly overstated and in my experience usually reflects the speaker not seeing their own political biases.

Take, for instance, approaching history from the perspective of seeking an "objective take". That's great if you want to be on the cutting edge of historical methodologies from the 1930s, but it's something we try to disabuse undergrads of today because it's not very useful. The modern view is that all histories are narratives and the job of the historian is to render our understanding of it as fully and fairly as possible. David Stack's paper is a pretty good introduction [0] to this idea.

And so, take a look at the Human History page on Wiki [1]. There are lots of things I disagree with (the use of the term "Hinduism" for LBA religion, the "Cradles of Civilization" view is a particular choice, etc), but it hits a lot of the right points as well. Seriously, you have no idea how few popular history sources almost completely forget that there's a world outside Eurasia. Frankly, the article as a whole is a perfectly adequate introduction to world history, with lots of branching-off points for the things that interest you.

You can choose to go beyond that with things like the 7.5 volume Cambridge World History series [2], but the sheer amount of text makes that terrible advice for most people. Nor can I recommend pop media because the media with the most production value is almost always the worst informationally.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12824

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/series/cambridge-world-histor...

	▲	johngossman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wish I could upvote this multiple times. However, I hope nobody takes away from this that all history is purely biased and therefore worthless. Reading a history book should be like having a conversation with a well-informed friend: you should expect them to get most things right, talk with others, and feel entitled to your own opinion. But you shouldn't ignore them because they might be wrong or stop talking to them because you differ with them, and definitely not assume you're smarter and more clear thinking than the expert.