July CultureKIT - Historical Cultures and Subcultures

This month's category is pretty much wide open--fiction or nonfiction about all of human history would qualify! But if you want to choose a stricter interpretation, you could read something about a culture or subculture that no longer exists or has radically changed between then and now, or maybe about when two cultures first encountered each other. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Fiction
The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis (mystery, ancient Rome)
The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby (mystery, ancient Athens)
Butterfly Swords by Jeannie Lin (romance, Tang Dynasty China)
Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard (fantasy/mystery, pre-colonial Aztec Empire)
A Bride's Story by Kaoru Mori (really gorgeously illustrated manga with various cultures crossing paths in central Asia on the Silk Road)
When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb (historical YA fantasy, Eastern European shtetl/Jewish immigrant communities in NYC)
The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich (children's fiction, 19th century Ojibwe)

Nonfiction
Fall of Civilizations by Paul Cooper (how multiple cultures became history, as it were)
White Mughals by William Dalrymple (encounters between British and Indian cultures in the 18th century)
428 AD by Giusto Traina (life in the late Roman Empire)
The Ruin of All Witches by Malcolm Gaskill (witch trials in colonial Massachusetts, but not the ones you're thinking of)
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold (poverty and working class women's lives in Victorian England)
Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz (more on cultures becoming history)
A Bite-Sized History of France by Stephane Henaut & Jeni Mitchell (because culinary history is a big part of cultural history)

If you'd like to post your choices to the wiki, it's here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2026_CultureKIT#July:_Historical_Culture...

My online reading group is reading Isis and Osiris, an Ancient Greek re-telling by Plutarch of Ancient Egyptian myth. I also have other books dealing with aspects of Greek and Roman society.

My plan is to read Daughters of Palatine Hill by Phyllis T. Smith, although something else might come up.