Recently Read: The World We Have Lost by Peter Laslett
The World We Have Lost frames the study of history as the discovery of both what happened in our past and how those historical facts are related to each other. The book discusses in particular the social and economic structure of England from around 1600 to 1900. The historical record of this period is spare, especially with respect to the everyday lives of the non-elite, but the author does his best to use existing scholarship and his original work to understand the “world we have lost”.
The book’s dozen chapters are quite independent, and if you read at least the first you could safely read as many or as few of the remaining ones as you like. I favored the chapters about the actual day-today conditions and realities of people’s lives, like “The Village Community” and “Did the Peasants Really Starve?”, to chapters making more abstract, philosophical arguments, like “Social Change and Revolution in the Traditional World”.