I love history too, Panda Girl! My first academic love. Actually got into the History Ph.D. program at University of Chicago but didn't go! (More fool me.) Love those names and dates! My favorites are plagues (the old Athenian, the sixth century Justinian, and that great old war horse, the 1347 Black Death!) And then those wonderful historians! Have you read ALL of Gibbon? What about good old Lord Macaulay? All available entirely for free on the internet. Then there are the historian rebels! Like the author of Wisconsin Death Trip who turned that in (if you haven't read it, you REALLY have to!) as his Ph.D. thesis! There's just so much! Probably my fave of faves is good old Gregory of Tours, whom I've re-read maybe six times. He really was the most amazing contemporary historian of Merovingian France (or Frankreich as it then was). I love Merovingian France. Talk about the Wild West! They would have eaten Wyatt Earp alive and chewed up Jesse James for dessert. Ancient Egypt. The real inside story of what the Romans ate for dinner. Saracen incursions into Dark Age Italy and France. The 30 Years War! Isaac Newton's father! Queen Christina of Sweden! The Chevalier d'Eon! Peter the Great! The Chinese visit to Virginia in the 1400's! The REAL invention of pasta! The history of surgery BEFORE anesthetics! The Marquis de Sade! The price of food in 1804! It just goes on and on and on and on!