I want to get into history, which time period should I research first?

Sumer and Egypt, might as well start at the beginning.

The Greeks

Don't start with a period start. Start with a country or region

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>>2638350
Just start watching youtube videos or reading articles about history. Once you find something that interests you then go into further detail, either through documentaries or podcasts. And finally start buying books that are within the topic.

Out of all of these options primary and secondary sources are objectively the best way to learn history, but they're a time commitment and a cost commitment if you don't have access to a library.

Personally I'm a Romeaboo so I started by watching Historia Civilis on YouTube and listening to the History of Rome Podcast. Then I jumped to reading Plutarch, Gibbon, and Caesars Memoirs.

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>>2638350
>I want to get into history, which time period should I research first?

Don't think of history as something you need to research all of. Even professional historians only generally have in depth knowledge of a few particular periods (a historian might write books and essays on the differences between German and Russian ground attack aircraft in WWII, but ask him who the Knight-chronicler that gave us the best 1st hand account of the 4th crusade was and he'll be like 'What?').

What you want to do are two things:

#1: Give yourself a knowledge of the general timeline of human history. This will allow you to contextualise any information you pick up, and give you an idea of the scale and span of time. So that if you read something about an event in a particular year, you know where that year fitted in the grand scheme of things. This is so that if you read about something happening in, say, 300 BC, you know that Alexander came a few decades before, Carthage and Rome are about to start the Punic Wars, Qin Shi Huang will unite China in just under a century, Chandragupta Maurya is uniting India right now, and the Olmecs collapsed around a century ago. A good knowledge of geography is also very important here. The goal should be to know roughly what a political map of Earth looked like (only the major players really matter) in any given century, so as to be able to contextualise new information.

#2: Learn only about things that deeply interest you. If you 'start with the Greeks' as the meme goes, you'll probably find the Greeks are intensely tedious (to you), and you'd much rather be learning about the Bronze Age Collapse, or the 1st Crusade, or Catherine the Great. Most people that appear knowledgeable about many periods of history started as children, going through phases of 'Oh wow suchandsuch empire is so cool, I want to know all about their wars and emperors', over time building a base of general knowledge covering many different time periods.

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>>2638350
fuck it all dude start with early modern

the HRE explains itself

>>2638350
Read about times of great change they are the most interesting and always have a shit ton of literature. So something like the late antiquity or the rise of the modern world are great topics