Another Best Books list, this time for the best history books of all time. This is one my husband and father-in-law would really enjoy. Personally, the titles are about to put me to sleep, so I think I’ll keep this list tucked away for when I need to do some research or am traveling somewhere. There are even some historical novels in there, near the end. (Most of these titles are from The List Muse (www.listmuse.com.)

UPDATE: I added a list of historical fiction after the list of history. There may be a little crossover.

• The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Fernand Braudel
• The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, four volumes, Eric Hobsbawm
• The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood
• The Rise of the West, William H. McNeill
• The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann
• What Is History?, E. H. Carr
• The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750, Peter Brown
• The Contours of American History, William Appleman Williams
• The Origins of the Second World War, A. J. P. Taylor
• The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
• The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James
• The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi
• Liberty Before Liberalism, Quentin Skinner
• Gender and the Politics of History, Joan Scott
• Search for Modern China, Jonathan Spence
• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, James M. McPherson
• The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World, Kenneth Pomeranz
• Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon
• The Strange Death of Liberal England: 1910-1914, George Dangerfield
• Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas
• Greece, Michael Rostovtzeff
• Rome, Michael Rostovtzeff
• The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
• Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It, Sheila Rowbotham
• The Century of Revolution, Christopher Hill
• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Tony Judt
• A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, Melvyn Leffler
• The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Ibn Khaldun
• The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English States, 1688-1783, John Brewer
• Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990-1992, Charles Tilly
• The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, Richard Hofstadter
• A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani
• Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, J. M. Neeson
• Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East, Geoffrey Wawro
• The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, Cornelius Tacitus
• Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People, Josiah Ober
• The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt
• American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, David E. Stannard
• The Great Chain of Being, Arthur O. Lovejoy
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
• The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad 1750 to Present, Walter LaFeber
• The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, John Newsinger
• Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Raymond Garthoff
• That Landscape of History, John Lewis Gaddis
• Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson
• The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg
• The First Emperor: Selections from the Historical Records, Sima Qian
• Imperial China 990-1800, F. W. Mote
• The Historian’s Craft, Marc Bloch
• How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
• African Perspectives on Colonialism, Albert Adu Boahen
• A History of Russia, Nicholas Roasanovsky and Mark Steinberg
• The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru
• Jefferson and Civil Liberaties: The Darker Side, Leonard W. Levy
• The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins
• The City in History, Lewis Mumford
• The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, Pierre Broue and Emile Temime
• The French Revolutions: From Its Origins to 1793, Georges Lefebvre
• The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750, James D. Tracy
• The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell
• The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Carlo Ginzburg
• The Korean War: A History, Bruce Cumings
• The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood
• History of the Byzantine State, George Ostrogorsky
• Age of the Democratic Revolution, R. R. Palmer
• The Crowd in History, George Rude
• History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky
• British Counterinsurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland, John Newsinger
• A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, James M. Burns and Robert O. Collins
• The Conquest of the Incas, John Hemming
• Hiroshima, John Hershey
• American Slavery: 1619-1877, Peter Kolchin
• The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel, Paul Krausse
• Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, John Womack
• Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch
• The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, Gabriel Kolko
• Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, Edmund S. Morgan
• The Great War: 1914-1918, Marc Ferro
• Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Jonathan I. Israel
• Europe and the People Without History, Eric R. Wolf
• Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm
• Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900-1300, Susan Reynolds
• Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt: 1320-1450, George Holmes
• Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, Henri Pirenne
• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe
• The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, Avi Shlaim
• Last Reflections on a War, Bernard B. Fall
• Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381, Rodney Hilton
• Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Eduardo Galeano
• Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation, Barry J. Kemp
• A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924, Orlando Figes
• The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, T. H. Alston, Robert Brenner, and C. H. E. Philpin
• Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Natalie Zemon Davis
• The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, J. G. A. Pocock
• Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830, John H. Elliott
• Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, Eric Metaxas
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
• Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson
• The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
• The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
• A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman
• 1776, David McCullough
• War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
• The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
• 1491, Charles C. Mann
• American History, Alan Brinkley
• A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan
• Ornamentalism, David Cannadine
• The Best War Ever, Michael C. C. Adams
• A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gerrtude Stein
• Founding Brothers, Joseph B. Ellis
• Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Louwen
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Undaunted Courage, Stephen B. Ambrose
• The Rise and Fall of the West, William H. McNeil
• Salt, Mark Kurlansky
• The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang
• The Civil War, Shelby Foote
• With the Old Breed, Eugene Sledge
• Ghengis Khan and the Modern World, Jack Weatherford
• 1493, Charles C. Mann
• Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
• The Prize, Daniel Yergin
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
• How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill
• The Great Influenza, John M. Barry

FOR SURE HISTORICAL FICTION

• Outlander, Diana Gabaldon
• The City of Brass, S.A. Chakroborty
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
• The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker
• The Lost Queen, Signe Pike
• The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Theodora Goss
• A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E. Schwab
• The Philosopher’s Flight, Tom Miller
• The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang
• All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr ***
• The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
• The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
• Night, Elie Weisel
• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
• A Tales of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
• Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin
• The Kite Runner, Khaled Housseni
• The Pillars of the Earth, Kenneth Follett
• The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
• A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
• A Rising Man, Abir Mukherjee
• Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
• As Meat Loves Salt, Maria Mcann
• Beloved, Toni Morisson
• The Book of Night Women, Marlon James
• The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
• The Bourbon Thief, Tiffany Reisz
• The Buddah in the Attic, Julie Otsuka
• Doc, Mary Doria Russell
• The Dovekeepers, Alice Hoffman
• The Fair Fight, Anna Freeman
• Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
• Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Ingrid Rojas Contreras
• The Game of Kings, Dorothy Dunnett
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• The Gods of Tango, Carolina de Robertis
• Homecoming, Yaa Gyasi
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Human Acts, Han Kang
• If You Leave Me, Crystal Hana Kim
• The King Must Die, Mary Renault
• Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Night Between Oceans, M. L. Stedman
• Moloka’i, Alan Brennert
• The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami
• My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
• Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
• Nefertiti, Michelle Moran
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
• The Queen of the Night, Alexander Chee
• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• Sacred Wilderness, Susan Power
• The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama
• The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert
• The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker
• Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See
• The Storm, Arif Anwar
• The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Things Fall Apart, Chinue Achebe
• The Twentieth Wife, Indu Sundaresan
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
• Washington Black, Esi Edugyan
• Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
• The Widows of Malabar Hill, Sujata Massey
• Wolf Hall, Hillary Mantel