r/AskHistorians · 2022
Top books in r/AskHistorians during 2022
Ranked by mentions in r/AskHistorians threads dated 2022. Useful for spotting what r/AskHistorians was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 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.
#2 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.
#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 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.
#5 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.
#6 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.
#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 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 Debt: The First 5,000 Years
David Graeber
An anthropologist argues that debt, not barter, built civilization — and that the standard economic origin story has been wrong for 5,000 years.
#10 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.
#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 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 A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
Toby Green
A ground-up history of West Africa before the Atlantic slave trade, told through politics, commerce, and the cowrie shells that wired it all together.
#14 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.
#15 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.
#16 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Doris Kearns Goodwin reconstructs how Lincoln outmaneuvered three men who each believed they should have been president instead.
#17 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.
#18 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.
#19 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.
#20 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.
#21 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.
#22 Berlin: The Downfall 1945
Antony Beevor
Antony Beevor's account of the Soviet assault on Berlin in April–May 1945, told through the soldiers and civilians who lived and died in it.
#23 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown
Dee Brown tells the conquest of the American West through the testimonies of the people who lost it, tribe by tribe, treaty by treaty.
#24 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.
#25 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.