What are some great history books that stuck with you after you finished them? Or that led you down deeper rabbit holes of learning? I’m not even looking solely for nonfiction (historical fiction is great too).
I’ve been on a huge history kick lately…just all periods. I want to learn everything and have been craving more and more awesome, gripping and engaging history books. Some stuff I’ve enjoyed recently:
Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen - presents an amazing background of various presidents who died in office and were succeeded by their vice president, who each became unlikely leaders and changed the course of US history in a myriad of ways. Super interesting and tons of tidbits that I never knew!
Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder - I admit I don’t know a ton about WW2 and the Holocaust beyond most of what you learn or hear about in popular culture. This book was mind boggling and devastating. The amount of killing and torture that Hitler and Stalin effectuated on their own people is astounding and horrendous.
The Women by Kristin Hannah - loved the emotion in this book. I have never dove much into Vietnam war era stories so this was super interesting. I would love to learn more about this time in world history.
SPQR by Mary Beard - I’d love to expand my knowledge of the Roman Empire…candidly I haven’t finished this book (it’s been a bit dry for me), but the topic is so intriguing I really want to keep at it and learn more. Any Roman History book suggestions?
The White Nile and The Blue Nile, both by Alan Moorehead - outstanding accounts of the exploration of the Nile River and the search for its headwaters.
Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs - Buddy Levy - A comprehensive history of the exploration and exploitation by the Spanish in Mexico
Rick Atkinson’s WWII trilogy.
1491, Charles Mann - America’s history prior to Columbus
Undaunted Coursage - Stephen Ambrose - The Lewis and Clark expedition
I really liked The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I took a stab at it I don’t know how many times- a lot of characters and they all have ridiculous names to where it’s hard to keep them straight
The Everyday Life in America series by various authors. There are six books, and if you Google the series title you should be able to find the series right quick.
The titles run like “Everyday Life in Colonial America”, “The Reshaping of American Life”, “The Uncertainty of American Life”, “As Various as Their Lands”.
The series is very thorough, and I was never bored reading it.
I had a history teacher that used Charles Fair’s From The Jaws Of History-A History of the Character, Causes & Consequences of Military Stupidity, from Crassus to Johnson & Westmoreland. I loved that class.
Absolute gems. Riveting and full of solid history. Some is a bit dated today, but that’s a quibble.
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 really opened my eyes. Guns of August is a good read, but she was conned the French doctoring documents.
Shattered Sword is mostly about the battle of Midway, but also why Imperial Japan went to a doomed war.
The Last Plantagenets - Thomas B. Costain is the last of a four book series about English History from William the Bastard to Richard III - and he presents a good case of why R3 did not kill the Princes in the Tower.
Not really a fan of the “definitive and exhaustive” massive tomes. To the academician readers they’re just compilations of stuff they have elsewhere, and the general public should be well-informed sufficiently with 600 pages of any one author’s take on a subject. Sorry Robert Caro, someone had to say it, but maybe you could’ve completed your life’s work if you’d been more succinct.
I enjoy when a pretty good documentary in its own right is followed up with a book full off all the good gouge that didn’t fit into the script. Kenneth Clark’s (Western) Civilisation, Jacob Bonowski’s Ascent of Man, Robert Hughes’ Shock of the New.
Sounds amazing! I’ll have to add it to my TBR list. Yours sounds similar to one of my all time favorite books: The March of Folly by Barbara W. Tuchman. “The book is about “one of the most compelling paradoxes of history: the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests”.” The section of the Vietnam War hit hard for this old boomer. I think everyone should read it, so we can recognize the signs when they come up. Even when we’re doomed to repeat it.
Amazing book. Rhodes is a historian, but he goes deeply into the science - back to the 19th century and forward to Niels Bohr and James Chadwick, and eventually the Manhattan Project. At one point he goes step by step through the millisecond chemical and physical sequence that occurs when a nuclear weapon detonates.
It’s fiction, but it’s the fictional story of a bedridden (momentarily-- he’s recovering from an on-duty injury) Scotland Yard detective and an American guy recently graduated with a BA in history (British, but a different period) from an American university, doing research in the BM as an excuse to be in London with his actress girlfriend. The too hook up to do serious research together on the fate of the Princes in the Tower, ultimately on a quest to exonerate Richard III.
The young American’s girlfriend is in a seemingly everlasting play with the great London actress Marta Hallard, who just happens to be a friend of the detective. Miss Hallard gets them together after first getting the detective interested in the case of the last Plantagenet.
Their research is real, although it might seem slow and scanty to someone with access to Google reading a book written in the 1950s, but perhaps it will give you an appreciation for the fact that they deal only with original sources, and not what someone claimed someone said somewhere else.
there are things left out, but so there are in books attacking Richard.
The book makes a few good points in the conversation among the characters to which other characters can respond.
Josephine Tey, for herself, prefers her roses no particular color-- she is biased against the tudors, and seems to feel the…
I have Undaunted Courage on my shelf right now…I should crack it open sometime. I tried to listen to the 1491 audiobook but struggled with it; maybe I should give the actual book a go instead.
Always wanted to get into the Atkins books!
Also that history of the Spanish exploration of Mexico gets me excited.
