r/history · 2020
Top books in r/history during 2020
Ranked by mentions in r/history threads dated 2020. 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 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.
#3 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.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#6 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.
#7 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.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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.
#11 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.
#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 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.
#14 The Fate of Africa
Martin Meredith
Martin Meredith's 5,000-year history of Africa, from ancient wealth to postcolonial collapse, told as a single relentless reckoning.
#15 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.
#16 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.
#17 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.