r/AskHistorians · 2019
Top books in r/AskHistorians during 2019
Ranked by mentions in r/AskHistorians threads dated 2019. Useful for spotting what r/AskHistorians was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
A Pulitzer-winning argument that geography, not race, drove civilizational dominance — and the book historians most love to demolish.
#2 The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
Adam Tooze
Adam Tooze's account of how Nazi Germany's economic desperation drove the war machine — and why it was always running out of time.
#3 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon
An 18th-century historian spends six volumes arguing that Christianity and barbarians killed Rome, and three centuries of scholars haven't stopped arguing back.
#4 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles C. Mann
Charles Mann reconstructs the Americas before Columbus — bigger populations, denser cities, and more deliberate landscapes than most history classes ever admitted.
#5 Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
James M. McPherson
James McPherson's one-volume Civil War history that r/AskHistorians recommends by name when someone asks where to start.
#6 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer
William Shirer's 1200-page eyewitness account of Nazi Germany, written by the CBS correspondent who watched it happen from inside Berlin.
#7 Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
Matthew Restall
Matthew Restall takes seven stories every American thinks they know about the Spanish Conquest and explains, one chapter at a time, why each one is wrong.
#8 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Charles C. Mann
How the Columbian Exchange remade the world after 1492 — diseases, crops, and ecosystems that crossed oceans and never looked back.
#9 SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
Mary Beard
Mary Beard's one-volume history of Rome that r/AskHistorians cites by name when Reddit needs a classicist to settle arguments about Romulus, Caesar, and what "Roman" even meant.
#10 Stalingrad
Antony Beevor
A German army of 300,000 surrounds a Soviet city, then gets surrounded itself — Beevor traces how the trap snapped shut.
#11 A Peace to End All Peace
David Fromkin
How British and French officials, improvising in wartime, drew the borders of the modern Middle East — and why those lines still bleed.
#12 Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
Daniel K. Richter
Daniel K. Richter's colonial history flips the map, reading European settlement from indigenous vantage points that colonial archives almost never preserved.
#13 King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild
Adam Hochschild reconstructs how King Leopold II of Belgium privately owned the Congo and killed millions, and how a handful of activists eventually exposed him.
#14 The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn's account of Soviet forced-labor camps, written from testimony and memory, disputed as history but impossible to dismiss.
#15 The Histories
Herodotus
Herodotus reports on the Persian Wars, Egyptian pharaohs, and a thief who escaped a king's treasury by decapitating the corpse of his brother.
#16 The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
Christopher Clark
Christopher Clark's 2012 argument that every major power sleepwalked into WWI — and that assigning blame to Germany alone gets the history wrong.
#17 A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Barbara W. Tuchman
A single French nobleman's life threads through the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the collapse of medieval order in 14th-century Europe.
#18 A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn retells American history from the bottom up, centering the enslaved, the colonized, and the labor organizer where textbooks put the president.
#19 Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
John W. Dower
John Dower's Pulitzer-winning account of Japan from 1945 to 1952, reconstructed from censored newspapers, black-market ledgers, and the wreckage MacArthur left behind.
#20 Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Jack Weatherford
A Montana anthropologist spent years in Mongolia to argue that Genghis Khan built the scaffold of the modern world — and historians have been arguing about it ever since.
#21 History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
Thucydides writes the Sicilian Expedition as a slow-motion catastrophe and spends the first pages explaining exactly why you should trust him over every other historian.
#22 One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark
Colin G. Calloway
A history of the Great Plains told through the winter counts — pictographic calendars tribes used to track time — spanning 20,000 years of indigenous life before and after contact.
#23 Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Tony Judt
A 900-page account of how Europe rebuilt, forgot, and reinvented itself from 1945 to the fall of the Iron Curtain and beyond — drawn from archives on both sides of the divide.
#24 Salt: A World History
Mark Kurlansky
Mark Kurlansky traces how a mineral humans cannot live without quietly dictated wars, trade routes, taxes, and the rise of civilizations.
#25 The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire
William Dalrymple
How a trading company with a balance sheet conquered a subcontinent — and why historians still argue about whether Dalrymple got the story right.