r/history · 2023
Top books in r/history during 2023
Ranked by mentions in r/history threads dated 2023. Useful for spotting what r/history was picking up or putting down that year.
#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.
#2 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.
#3 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.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#6 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.
#7 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.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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.