r/AskHistorians · 2020
Top books in r/AskHistorians during 2020
Ranked by mentions in r/AskHistorians threads dated 2020. Useful for spotting what r/AskHistorians was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 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.
#2 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.
#3 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.
#4 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
A historian writes one book to cover all of human history, and r/AskHistorians spends years explaining why that was a bad idea.
#5 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.
#6 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.
#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 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.
#9 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.
#10 Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland
Tom Holland narrates the fall of the Roman Republic as a political thriller, from Sulla's march on Rome to the Ides of March.
#11 Stalingrad
Antony Beevor
A German army of 300,000 surrounds a Soviet city, then gets surrounded itself — Beevor traces how the trap snapped shut.
#12 The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
Andrés Reséndez
Andres Resendez reconstructs five centuries of Indian enslavement in the Americas — a system that ran parallel to African chattel slavery and outlasted it.
#13 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.
#14 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.
#15 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.
#16 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.
#17 Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas
Jeffrey Ostler
Jeffrey Ostler traces how Native nations held together from the American Revolution through Bleeding Kansas while U.S. policy ground toward erasure.
#18 The Complete Roman Army
Adrian Goldsworthy
Adrian Goldsworthy's field-by-field account of how Rome built, equipped, and sustained the army that held an empire together for five centuries.
#19 The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
Bryan Ward-Perkins
A historian argues that Rome's fall wasn't a cultural transition but a civilizational collapse — and uses pottery shards to prove it.
#20 The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Peter Frankopan
Peter Frankopan redraws world history from Central Asia outward, arguing the Middle East was the engine of civilization long before Europe noticed.
#21 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.
#22 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.
#23 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.
#24 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.
#25 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.