r/history · 2019
Top books in r/history during 2019
Ranked by mentions in r/history threads dated 2019. Useful for spotting what r/history 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 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.
#3 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.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#6 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.
#7 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.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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 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.
#12 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.
#13 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.
#14 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.
#15 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.
#16 The Guns of August
Barbara W. Tuchman
Barbara Tuchman's account of August 1914 — the month European armies marched into a war none of them planned to survive.
#17 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.