Histories You Can Read

An Infallibly Fallible List for the Lay Reader

I have been doing reviews of novels, because I want to share books that are worth reading with you. But, since I have all this education in history, I thought I compile a list works that are histories but readable enough for a general audience. Most of what I have read are academic monographs, and unless you are in the academic world, I could hardly recommend them. People complain heartily about academic history but there’s a simple answer for that. Academic historians are much more concerned with analysis than narrative, which bores most people, who just want a good story. I chose these because they are well written but not all are narratives, and some are quite complex (and long).

All the books listed here are well written, and one perhaps two are even literary in quality. They basically reflect my tastes in history, more than my education. Only three of the work were assigned to me in my coursework; the rest I came upon myself. About half were written by academic historians or who were at one point in their careers. The rest are written by professional writers, mostly journalists. (Note: please don’t let the page numbers scare you away. I give the page numbers to give a sense of how long each book is, but do remember that much each book is taken up by bibliographies and indices. Not all of them are that long!) What follows is a short summary of each and my take on why it is worth reading. Enjoy. -DT

1. David Howarth, 1066: the Year of the Conquest (Penguin, 1981, 208 pp.)

   Howarth’s slim, short history of the Norman Conquest of England is one of the books that persuaded me to study history in college. It tells the story of one of history’s most famous and important events in readable prose, and fired my imagination. Howarth was a former naval officer who wrote numerous works on military history, and my professor assigned it precisely because it was suitable for students (i.e, human beings). Mission accomplished.

2. Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (Anchor, 1999, 447 pp.)

   Ackroyd is an English biographer and historian who has written numerous works on English luminaries such as Shakespeare and a history of the Tudor dynasty. His biography of Thomas More, the great Renaissance scholar and Catholic martyr, is elegantly written, and provides keen insight into the life of a fascinating Catholic figure. Ackroyd’s biography was written after a sea change in the academic historiography of the English Reformation, and its strength is its presentation of what the last days of Catholic England might have been like.

   Ackroyd is a fine craftsman, and this is one of the books I enjoyed the most.

3. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: the Clash of Religion and Politics from the French Revolution to the Great War (Harper, 2006, 544 pp.)

   Burleigh was an academic historian specializing in the history of the Third Reich, before becoming a writer and member of a think tank at the London School of Economics. Earthly Powers is an interesting study of nationalism, clearly inspired by his work on the Nazis. He describes it as a history of “civic religions” produced by the great age of revolutions, with their cult of the nation, the rituals and symbols that came to clash with more traditional religions. A well written, thoughtful study of a fascinating topic.

4. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Mariner Books, 2000, 416 pp.)

   Between 2014 and 2019, I went on a binge of reading books about World War I for obvious reasons. Rites of Spring is the best work I have ever read on the Great War, and one of the best works of academic history I have ever read. In fact, Eksteins is a literary scholar of Central European heritage, and his work centers on the modernizing trends in European culture that brought about the war. The infamous performance of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring on the eve of the war in Paris forms the backdrop for his discussion, which takes the reader up through World War II. This is a kind of work written by a senior scholar at the end of his career, and though it might be a bit much for the lay reader, it is so full of interesting insights I couldn’t leave it off the list.

5. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (Stanford UP, 1997 [1935], 364 pp.)

   This is both the oldest book on the list, originally published in 1935, and the only one I would call a work of literature. Certainly, it is the most beautifully written. It tells the story of how Britain nearly fell into civil war over the issue of Irish Home Rule before being swallowed up by WWI. But it is also an elegy for the world that died in that conflict, and it is one of the few works of history whose turns of phrase I can still remember. Witty and sympathetic by turns, its historical judgments are no longer tenable (the “liberalism” denoted by the title means economic liberalism, which of course didn’t die in WWI and revived with Thatcher in the 80s.), and suffers from some Freudian, pop psychologizing that was current in the 1930s that dates it. (We would call it “cringe” today.) But it is the most wonderfully written book of history I have ever encountered.

6. Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery (Ballantine Books, 2006, 304 pp.)

   Someone I follow on Twitter recommended this book, which I in turn assigned to students in my American history surveys in the 2010s. A breezy account of how the Northern states supported slavery in a myriad of ways before the Civil War, it originated in a special edition of the Hartford Courant, when three reporters discovered the newspaper had once owned slaves. The book is very fast paced, and provides excerpts from primary sources to illustrate its main idea, namely that the norther colonies and later states supported slavery until the 1850s pretty readily without much compunction. It is not an academic work, but it is based on some primary research, and provides a fascinating look at a topic few know much about.

7. Laura Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (Vintage, 1991, 444 pp.)

   Ulrich was a Harvard historian and A Midwife’s Tale won the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1991. It follows the life of Martha Ballard, a New England mid-wife, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth. Through the telling of Ballard’s story, Ulrich traces changes in New England society, especially on matters of family and marriage, as reflected in her diary. This is the only book on this list I was assigned in a graduate course, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed the book, as women’s history is not something I am normally interested in. But it is well written, smartly covers a fascinating topic and is suitable for a wide audience.

8. David McCullough, John Adams (Simon and Schuster, 2001, 752 pp.)

   I recall, with shame, getting into an argument with someone over this book when I was in graduate school. I claimed it wasn’t “real history” because it wasn’t an academic work. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I devoured this great doorstopper of a book in less than a week, which is not surprising, since McCullough was one of the finest writers of history in his time. He is a good research, and conscientious about his subject, very much using his keen eye for significant anecdotes to bring Adams to life. Adams won a Pulitzer for his book 1776, but this is a fine work in its own right. One of my few complaints is that he doesn’t really spend as much time as he could have on Adam’s religious beliefs. He recounts the famous story of Adams attending a Catholic mass while in Philadelphia, but moves on pretty quickly. But other than these quibbles, it is one of the best historical biographies out there.

9. David Paul Kuhn, The Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working Class Revolution (Oxford UP, 2020, 416 pp.)

   Kuhn is a New York based journalist, and this is reflected in this book. It takes as its starting point a riot that occurred in 1970, when a group of constructions workers in downtown Manhattan disrupted an anti-war protest by students at City Hall, which turned into a melee in which they assaulted the protestors. Kuhn weaves around this the tale of how the Democratic Party abandoned the white working class for its new rainbow coalition, centering it on New York City politics. Kuhn did his research well, and his contextualizing of the riot with Nixon’s rise is worth the price of the book alone. He might have played up the riot a bit too much; there were no death, and basically what happened is that the workers beat up a bunch of trust fund babies (there were serious class antagonisms involved, which Kuhn deftly describes). But on the whole, it is a fascinating read and well worth your time.

10. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf Doubleday, 2009, 364 pp.)

    Faust was another Harvard historian, who also became its president. Her book discusses how the Civil War with its horrific death toll and mangling of bodies transformed American attitudes toward death in the 19th century. Thoughtfully written and clearly aimed at a wider audience, it was a finalist for the National Book Award and PBS made it into a documentary. I am not wholly convinced by some of her arguments (she claims that the Civil War contributed to the growth of secularism in the United States, but I think she overdoes it) but it is a fascinating look at how the war altered the way the United States dealt with the problem of war deaths, and how American society commemorated them.

11. Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918 (Vintage, 2017, 784 pp.)

    Montefiore comes from a distinguished Jewish family, and has written several well received histories. The Romanovs covers the last imperial dynasty from its origins to its demise in 1918. Well written and lavishly illustrated, it may be a bit of a slog as it is the longest work on this list, but if you are feeling frisky, it is worth your time.

12. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: its Rise and Function in Late Antiquity (U. Chicago Press, 1981, 187 pp.)

    Peter Brown is one of the greatest of all academic historians, and if you have the patience for works aimed at other academics, there is no one I would recommend more. This work is actually a short series of lectures he gave (hence his brevity) dealing with the origins of the cult of the saints, in particular the veneration of their relics. It presents a view of how this practice came about among the early Christians which demolishes a lot of modern preconceptions about it. As a Catholic, I can’t say enough much I loved this book. It is probably the only work of academic history that ever increased my faith, if that’s possible—even more remarkable when you consider Brown is a Protestant from Northern Ireland! One of my favorites on this list.

13. Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (HarperOne, 2014, 448 pp.)

    Jenkins is a history professor at Baylor University, who has written numerous books that did well with a wide audience on things like “lost Christianities” and anti-Catholicism in America (interesting given that he is a former Catholic). The Great and Holy War lays out how a war that started out in the realms of realpolitik became a sort of religious crusade for several of the combatants in the war. Jenkins is a good writer, and this is one of the more stimulating books I read on the Great War. Highly recommended.

14. Kenneth Woodward, Getting Religion: Faith, Culture and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama (Convergent Books, 2016, 464 pp.)

    Kenneth Woodward was a journalist and longtime religion editor for Newsweek, back when it used to cover the news. Getting Religion is part memoir, part chronicle of his times, and though it isn’t a conventional history, it is very revealing because of his former perch at Newsweek. Back then, major newspapers and magazines had bureaus in all the major world capitals, and so he had access to information you might not find elsewhere. He also interviewed virtually every major religious figure in a fifty year period, from Billy Graham to the Dalai Lama. (Note that Woodward is a practicing Catholic, and has much to say about changes that took place during the period covered.) This is probably one of the most readable books on the list.