r/history · 2022
Top books in r/history during 2022
Ranked by mentions in r/history threads dated 2022. 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 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.
#3 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.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#6 The Fortunes of Africa
Martin Meredith
Five thousand years of African history, from the Nile pharaohs to the colonial scramble, told as a single continuous story.
#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 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.
#9 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.
#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 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.
#12 Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
A philologist traces Arab identity from pre-Islamic inscriptions through modern nation-states, arguing the word 'Arab' has meant something different in every century.
#13 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.
#14 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.
#15 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.
#16 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.
#17 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.