r/AskHistorians · 2021
Top books in r/AskHistorians during 2021
Ranked by mentions in r/AskHistorians threads dated 2021. 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 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.
#3 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.
#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 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.
#6 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.
#7 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.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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.
#11 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.
#12 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.
#13 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.
#14 A History of the Arab Peoples
Albert Hourani
Albert Hourani traces Arab civilization from the Prophet's era to the 1980s, asking how a shared language and faith became — and stayed — a civilization.
#15 Carthage Must Be Destroyed
Richard Miles
A historian reconstructs Carthage from the wreckage Rome left behind, tracing a civilization known almost entirely through its enemies' accounts.
#16 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.
#17 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.
#18 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.
#19 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.
#20 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.
#21 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.
#22 The Face of Battle
John Keegan
John Keegan dismantles the mythology of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme by asking what it was actually like to stand in the line.
#23 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.
#24 The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
Richard Rhodes traces the physics, the personalities, and the politics that turned fission theory into two bombs dropped on Japan in three years.
#25 The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt's 1951 anatomy of how antisemitism, imperialism, and ideology combined to produce the Nazi and Stalinist regimes.