I recently watch Ken Burns' wonderful documentary Civil War. It featured novelist-cum-historian Shelby Foote (now deceased). His three-volume, 1.5 million word long history, The Civil War, is thought to be the best account of the US civil war by a non-academic historian.

Does anyone else know of any other such claim in any other area of history?

Edward Gibbon......

FTW. Wow. Who would have thought it? Thanks for this.

Always loved Barbara Mertz approach to Egypt in "Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs" where she speculates and editorializes, but in a fun way. She employs this same kind of fervor in fiction as well. With several other nom de plumes.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is pretty great if you ask me, and he routinely reminds the listener that he is not a historian, just a fan of history.

An honourable mention should be made of Winston Churchill's A History Of The English-Speaking Peoples if only because I no of only one other attempt to cover the same ground but a later period and Churchill's 4 volume set was well received both commercially and critically.

In the last week I've listened to Carlin's "The Celtic Holocaust" and the first 2 "Kings of Kings" podcasts and was fairly impressed. You can tell he really loves the stuff.

There's no point in learning about history, because it's written by the winners of the war.

If Russia wins the war, Russian children will grow up learning about how the Ukrainians were Nazis seeking to get their hands on nuclear weapons, in government run schools.

If Germany won World War 2, we would all grow up believing that the Holocaust was a necessary evil, to give rise to a master race.

North Koreans grow up believing that their country cured aids and invented the hamburger.

We grow up learning that America landed on the moon in 1969. But then why have we never gone back? And in the footage of the moon landing why is the flag blowing, when there is no wind on the moon. The landing was clearly filmed in a studio.