The best books that will hook you on history

I’ve always loved writing and learning about history. And no one exemplifies the marriage of these preoccupations better than McCullough. With his first book, he didn’t set out to do groundbreaking research - he just wanted to tell a great story. 

In The Johnstown Flood, McCullough does just that.

The book tells the story of one this once flourishing town that was destroyed when a nearby dam gave way, and a deluge swept away homes, businesses, and people. 

Throughout the book, McCullough brought these poor souls back to life through great prose and an ability to connect with his subjects. Even though this happened well over a century before I read the book, it made me feel, at least a bit, the devastation of the event.

A little over three decades after writing The Johnstown Flood, McCullough used his uncanny ability to connect with history subjects to create the best biography of John Adams ever written. 

Titling it simply John Adams, McCullough walks readers through the life of one of America’s greatest revolutionaries and second president. With this book, McCullough takes Adams out of his vaunted place in the American pantheon of patriots and brings him back down to earth.

We get to know the world and family into which John was born in 18th-century Massachusetts. We learn how his humble beginnings as a farmer’s son and the Protestant work ethic that still permeated New England during his youth forged him into a tenaciously hard worker. 

But Boston was not yet the metropolis it is today, and this small colonial city could not hold Adams’ ambitions for long.

McCullough explores Adams’ path to revolution, a path that took him first to Philadelphia, then (somewhat reluctantly) to France, the Netherlands, and England. With each stop, Adams’ patriotism grew, the stubborn reaction of a stubborn man intent on making his mark on history and his nation. 

While this was the part of Adams’ life I found most interesting, McCullough’s book continued on through the end of the great man’s life. Through his relationships with his wife Abigail, his children (who underwent their own hardships), and his fellow revolutionaries, McCullough nails the character of the man: highly intelligent, stubborn, and driven by his sense of what was right. 

I’ll stop the review of John Adams here before it becomes as long as the book itself. But trust me, it’s worth reading.

I absolutely love learning about the Revolutionary era and the 18th-century at large. And John Adams no doubt played a role in shaping this passion. 

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, McCullough places readers smack dab in the middle of 18th and 19th-century America. Using wonderful storytelling, McCullough follows the life of one of the era’s most accomplished people, John Adams, on his path from proud British subject to the ultimate revolutionary and eventual president of the United States. 

Using John Adams as his subject, McCullough captures the spirit of the American Revolution and the struggles of the early republic.

While this is a rather scholarly book with a bit of an intimidating title, I was surprised by how enjoyable of a read it was. 

Through this work, Woolf explores what it meant to be a native to Gaul, the traumatic experience of the Roman conquest (estimates of Gaulish deaths are in the millions), and how the Gauls and Romans shaped the culture of the region moving forward.

With expert skill, Woolf shows that the process of romanization in Gaul was not just a case of Roman forcing the Gauls to act Roman or the Gauls imitating Roman ways to placate their new overlords. Instead, it was a process of cultural give-and-take, in which both sides took on aspects of the other. 

It’s truly fascinating stuff. 

My interest in colonization and imperialism peaked by Becoming Roman and other such books and I wanted to know how these processes had worked out in the imperial experiences that shaped our modern world. So I picked up Guns, Germ, and Steel.

Through this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Diamond set out to discover the factors that allowed European powers to conquer most of the world from 1492 and on. Relatively speaking, they were backwater kingdoms, still clinging to inefficient feudal economies. So, how did they do it? For Diamond, it boiled down to three variables: guns, germs, and steel. 

Though it has come under fire for oversimplifying many aspects of European colonialism and imperialism, Gun, Germs, and Steel exposed me to new ways of researching and telling the stories seemingly lost by the very processes Diamond enumerated.