How can I brush up my general history knowledge?

Question

I feel like I don't know enough about American and World history. What's an easy (though time-consuming, I'm sure), interesting, and compact but complete way for a busy person to learn basically a complete world history?

Answer 1

oh yes! it's called "Don't Know Much About History" (Kenneth Davis) it's absolutely amazing. I own it, I've read it several times, It makes me love history even more. seriously. read that book, i am not even kidding. you could teach a class with it.  

Answer 2

Reading biographies of important people from the era I was interested in helped me the best.

Answer 3

the way I have learnt most of my knowledge of History is through documentaries on youtube.  However, it may not be the same for you; i'm a visual learner, so it works best for me. i can't concentrate long enough for a book or anything like that.

i recommend researching majour history events then look on youtube for documentaries about them.  (and don't worry, there are some good/interesting ones that are posted, I'm 16, so as you would expect, i would never sit through a boring documentary on my own will)

Answer 4

I like timeline books for quick reviews.  You can read these in bits when you have a few minutes.  My favorite is "History's Timeline" from Crescent Books: New York edited by Fay Franklin 1981 by Grisewood and Dempsey Ltd.

Here's a link to get a used copy very inexpensively (one cent plus shipping) from Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Historys-Timeline-...