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r/AskHistorians · 2021

Most-mentioned books in r/AskHistorians during 2021

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/AskHistorians within the published source unit for 2021. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

36
Books ranked
117
Tracked mentions in 2021
Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions
Cover of Guns, Germs, and Steel #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.

16 in 2021
Cover of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era #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.

11 in 2021
Cover of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America #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.

8 in 2021
Cover of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus #4

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles C. Mann

Charles Mann tours archaeologists arguing the pre-Columbian Americas were as populous and engineered as anything in Europe.

7 in 2021
Cover of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire #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.

7 in 2021
Cover of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire #6

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

William Dalrymple

A private trading company raises its own army and conquers most of India, and this is the story of a business doing what most empires couldn't.

6 in 2021
Cover of The Histories #7

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.

6 in 2021
Cover of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II #8

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

John W. Dower

MacArthur's occupation government rewrites Japan from the wreckage up, and the Emperor walks away from war-crimes charges intact.

5 in 2021
Cover of 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created #9

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.

3 in 2021
Cover of A Peace to End All Peace #10

A Peace to End All Peace

David Fromkin

The Ottoman Empire collapses after World War One, and Britain and France carve up the pieces into the borders the modern Middle East still lives inside.

3 in 2021
Cover of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind #11

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.

3 in 2021
Cover of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas #12

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.

3 in 2021
Cover of The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization #13

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.

3 in 2021
Cover of The Gulag Archipelago #14

The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A Soviet prisoner catalogs decades of arrests, interrogations, and camps into a single indictment of the system that made them possible.

3 in 2021
Cover of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World #15

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.

2 in 2021
Cover of One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark #16

One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark

Colin G. Calloway

A history of the American West before Lewis and Clark, told through the peoples who were already there.

2 in 2021
Cover of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 #17

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.

2 in 2021
Cover of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest #18

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.

2 in 2021
Cover of The Complete Roman Army #19

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.

2 in 2021
Cover of The Face of Battle #20

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.

2 in 2021
Cover of The Making of the Atomic Bomb #21

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes

Szilard talks Einstein into signing a letter to Roosevelt, and six years later Los Alamos turns the idea into two bombs before anyone can stop it.

2 in 2021
Cover of The Origins of Totalitarianism #22

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.

2 in 2021
Cover of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich #23

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.

2 in 2021
Cover of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 #24

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.

2 in 2021
Cover of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy #25

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.

2 in 2021