Reader's Corner: History
Looking for a good book to read but don't know where to start? This guide covers popular, award-winning, and just plain great nonfiction and fiction genres and books.
Staff Picks
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality--and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
Call Number: CB19 .G69 2021Publication Date: 2021-11-09
Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows by
Best Books of the Year * Financial Times, The Times (of London), History Today Marking the 200th anniversary of his death, Napoleon is an unprecedented portrait of the emperor told through his engagement with the natural world. "How should one envisage this subject? With a great pomp of words, or with simplicity?" --Charlotte Brontë, "The Death of Napoleon" The most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas Carlyle first christened him "our last Great Man," regiments of biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. Yet in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured, and a mere handful of women have written his biography--a fact that surely would have pleased him. With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the "Great Man" theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon's life through gardens, parks, and forests. As Scurr reveals, gardening was the first and last love of Napoleon, offering him a retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Gardens were, at the same time, a mirror image to the battlefields on which he fought, discrete settings in which terrain and weather were as important as they were in combat, but for creative rather than destructive purposes. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical scholarship, and taking us from his early days at the military school in Brienne-le-Château through his canny seizure of power and eventual exile, Napoleon frames the general's story through the green spaces he cultivated. Amid Corsican olive groves, ornate menageries in Paris, and lone garden plots on the island of Saint Helena, Scurr introduces a diverse cast of scientists, architects, family members, and gardeners, all of whom stood in the shadows of Napoleon's meteoric rise and fall. Building a cumulative panorama, she offers indelible portraits of Augustin Bon Joseph de Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who used his position to advance Napoleon's career; Marianne Peusol, the fourteen-year-old girl manipulated into a Christmas-Eve assassination attempt on Napoleon that resulted in her death; and Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, the atlas maker to whom Napoleon dictated his memoirs. As Scurr contends, Napoleon's dealings with these people offer unusual and unguarded opportunities to see how he grafted a new empire onto the remnants of the ancien régime and the French Revolution. Epic in scale and novelistic in its detail, Napoleon, with stunning illustrations, is a work of revelatory range and depth, revealing the contours of the general's personality and power as no conventional biography can.
Call Number: BIOG DC203.9 .S435 2021Publication Date: 2021-06-15
About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by
One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best History Books of 2021 A captivating, surprising history of timekeeping and how it has shaped our world. For thousands of years, people of all cultures have made and used clocks, from the city sundials of ancient Rome to the medieval water clocks of imperial China, hourglasses fomenting revolution in the Middle Ages, the Stock Exchange clock of Amsterdam in 1611, Enlightenment observatories in India, and the high-precision clocks circling the Earth on a fleet of GPS satellites that have been launched since 1978. Clocks have helped us navigate the world and build empires, and have even taken us to the brink of destruction. Elites have used them to wield power, make money, govern citizens, and control lives--and sometimes the people have used them to fight back. Through the stories of twelve clocks, About Time brings pivotal moments from the past vividly to life. Historian and lifelong clock enthusiast David Rooney takes us from the unveiling of al-Jazari's castle clock in 1206, in present-day Turkey; to the Cape of Good Hope observatory at the southern tip of Africa, where nineteenth-century British government astronomers moved the gears of empire with a time ball and a gun; to the burial of a plutonium clock now sealed beneath a public park in Osaka, where it will keep time for 5,000 years. Rooney shows, through these artifacts, how time has been imagined, politicized, and weaponized over the centuries--and how it might bring peace. Ultimately, he writes, the technical history of horology is only the start of the story. A history of clocks is a history of civilization.
Call Number: TS542 .R66 2021Publication Date: 2021-08-17
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America by
Instant #1 New York Times bestseller A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021 A 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2021 Named a Best Book of 2021 The New York Times, The Washington Post, & The Boston Globe, The Economist, Smithsonian,& Esquire, Entropy, The Christian Science Monitor,& WBEZ's Nerdette Podcast,& TeenVogue,& GoodReads, SheReads, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Fathom Magazine, the New York Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Longlisted for the National Book Award Los Angeles Times, Best Nonfiction Gift One of President Obama's Favorite Books of 2021 Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks--those that are honest about the past and those that are not--that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view--whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.
Call Number: E185 .S58123 2021Publication Date: 2021-06-01
Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-1945 by
A thought-provoking and original reassessment of World War II, from Britain's leading military historian Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain's most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the "last imperial war," with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires. Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath--which extended far beyond 1945. Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.
Call Number: D743 .O84 2021Publication Date: 2022-04-05
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST * LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD * ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, Publishers Weekly * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, Smithsonian Magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews "Deeply layered and insightful . . . [a] bold reflection on American history, African American resilience, and the human capacity for love and perseverance in the face of soul-crushing madness."--The Washington Post "A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness."--Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language--including Rose's wish that "It be filled with my Love always." Ruth's sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley's sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose's gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women's faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives--and the lives of so many women like them--to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. The search to uncover this history is part of the story itself. For where the historical record falls short of capturing Rose's, Ashley's, and Ruth's full lives, Miles turns to objects and to art as equally important sources, assembling a chorus of women's and families' stories and critiquing the scant archives that for decades have overlooked so many. The contents of Ashley's sack--a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, "my Love always"--are eloquent evidence of the lives these women lived. As she follows Ashley's journey, Miles metaphorically unpacks the bag, deepening its emotional resonance and exploring the meanings and significance of everything it contained. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.
Call Number: E445.S7 M55 2021Publication Date: 2021-06-08
Twelve Caesars: Images of Power From the Ancient World to the Modern by
From the bestselling author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the fascinating story of how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book--against a background of today's "sculpture wars"--Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the "Twelve Caesars," from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns. Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, presenting a fresh look at works by artists from Memling and Mantegna to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as by generations of weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and ceramicists. Rather than a story of a simple repetition of stable, blandly conservative images of imperial men and women, Twelve Caesars is an unexpected tale of changing identities, clueless or deliberate misidentifications, fakes, and often ambivalent representations of authority. From Beard's reconstruction of Titian's extraordinary lost Room of the Emperors to her reinterpretation of Henry VIII's famous Caesarian tapestries, Twelve Caesars includes fascinating detective work and offers a gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Call Number: N7575 .B38 2021Publication Date: 2021-10-12
History Booklists in the BPL Online Catalog
- Our History: The Story of BostonA look at the history of Boston from an overview to the specifics.
- Women of BostonThis list is a collection of titles chronicling the experiences of women in Boston.
- It Happened in Boston: 11 Notable Local Interest Titles from 2021For those of you who like to keep up with all things Hub related, here is a list of titles to select from for your TBR list. Choices range from a guide to Boston's 50 oldest buildings by city archaeologist Joseph Bagley, to an account of a murder in the city's notorious Combat Zone in 1976. Click on the titles to access additional information and reviews in our catalog.
- Presidential BooklistCelebrate the past and present leaders of our nation by discovering the many books - nonfiction, fiction, biography, memoir, children, adult, and even a musical - based on the lives of our Presidents.
- Passionate PresidentsFor a view of the Presidents and their relationships with women -wives or other illicit affairs - take a look at this list.
- America's First LadiesWant to know more about the ladies behind the great leaders of the United States? Take a look at this list of books detailing the lives of America's First Ladies. Note that some of these titles may be in-library use only.
- Mr. President: Books On Our Nation's Leaders 1-32Want to learn more about past presidents of the United States? Check out these biographies of the first 32 presidents. If you are interested in biographies of presidents, take a look at Stephen Floyd's blog and his mission to find the "Best Biography" of each president at: https://bestpresidentialbios.com/
- Mr. President: Books On Our Nation's Leaders 33-44Want to learn more about past presidents of the United States? Check out these biographies/autobiographies of presidents 33-44. If you are interested in biographies of presidents, take a look at Stephen Floyd's blog and his mission to find the "Best Biography" of each president at: https://bestpresidentialbios.com/
- Honest Abe: Getting to Know Our 16th PresidentA list of both non-fiction and fiction books about or involving our 16th President: Abraham Lincoln.
- China's Cultural RevolutionMao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution on May 16, 1966. He outlined his new agenda at a Politburo meeting in which he declared that China needed to be purged of "revisionist" elements that had infiltrated the country. The Cultural Revolution led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions as intellectuals were sent to labor camps and peasant villages for "re-education. The Cultural Revolution left an indelible imprint on Chinese society.
- Hitler & the Nazis: Warnings From HistoryEver wondered how Hitler and the horrors that he subjected millions to, came to be? How did this one man convince the German nation to treat neighbors with such disrespect, disgust, and violence? Take a look at these non-fiction titles about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, his henchmen, and Nazism to gain some insight.
- Karl Marx: His Life, World, & WorksIn recent years there has been renewed interest in the works of Karl Marx. This growing interest is due in part to the financial crisis of 2008, the continuing global recession. and the perception among many of a developing societal divide driven by economic factors. Whether you prefer to read Marx’s own writings, or a new title with a fresh perspective on his work; watch a movie of the young Marx working for change in 1840s Europe, or access some free online courses on Das Kapital (Capital); there is something on this list for you. Take this opportunity to become reacquainted with the philosopher and thinker whose ideas had such a profound influence on the history of the 20th century.
- The Irish War of Independence, 1919-1921The Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) started on the 21st January, 1919 when a party of Irish Republican Army volunteers ambushed and killed two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary at Soloheadbeg in Country Tipperary. That same day, a meeting of the first Dail (Irish parliament) took place, and Irish independence was declared. To learn more about the conflict, check out this list of resources.
- World Mythology and LegendsEvery part of the world has it's own myths, legends, folk tales and stories. Here is a list to get you started on exploring world mythology and legends.
- If you liked In the Garden of Beasts...If you enjoyed In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, try these similar titles put together in a list by Books and Authors.