100 books like Common Sense

The Haitian Revolution was long left out of the history of Atlantic revolutions, dismissed as a violent uprising of enslaved people without an ideological dimension.

Dubois’s book walks readers through the twists and turns of this decade-long revolution, highlighting the intellectual agency of enslaved and freed people and the ideological consequences of this transformative event.

The Haitian Revolution is a notoriously complicated event, but I found that this book provided coherence and a compelling analysis of the effects of this crucial moment in the history of democracy and movement for human rights. And it was a gripping read at that.

No book has done more to change my thinking about the American Revolution and Constitution.

It’s a tome, but if you want to understand the political philosophy of the American Revolution—from the Stamp Act to the ratification of the federal Constitution—then this is your book. Wood follows the evolution of and innovation in American political thought from the struggle for independence through the creation of a new nation.

In doing so, he makes the case for why the American Revolution was revolutionary and raises the possibility of seeing the Constitution as an act of counter-revolution.

What makes a revolution thinkable? Looking back, we tend to think we can identify revolutions, pinpoint their causes, and analyze their outcomes.

In this classic account of the years leading up to the French Revolution, Baker traces how revolutionaries were able to imagine a revolution and how they invented the very concept as they went. Even as they were hell-bent on breaking the Old Regime, the French revolutionaries were shaped and limited by it; their thinking was ultimately bounded by the concepts and language available to them going in.

I love this book because it provides a stimulating history of ideas and their unintended consequences. It also gave me a transformative insight into the intellectual story of the French Revolution.

Understanding what turns someone into a revolutionary has always interested me.

Sure, there are ideas floating around and there may be material interests motivating decisions. But what causes someone to go from being a reformer to a revolutionary? Tackett digs into the memoires, diaries, and correspondence of deputies sent to the Estates General in 1789 to illuminate how their perspectives evolved throughout the first years of the French Revolution.

His account captures the pressure of crowds, the fumbling of inexperienced politicians, the fears for family back home, and the un-relenting unpredictability of events in a way that clarifies how people and dynamics radicalized. It made me think about revolutions in a totally new way by bringing in the day-to-day experiences of those who took part shaping the course of events.

If you want to know what motivated ordinary British colonists to pick up a musket, spear, or sword and take on the most powerful military in the world, read Thomas Paine’s essays Common Sense and The Crisis. Common Sense was the ideological underpinning of the movement toward independence. Paine’s experiences with the Continental Army during the dark days of late 1776 inspired The Crisis, and Washington ordered it read to the troops to encourage them to stay by the Colors for one last great gamble at Trenton. In my research, I found that the average American soldier truly believed in the cause of Independence; that belief has much to do with the writings of Thomas Paine.

While not strictly a book on fashion in Paris, it is a wonderful exploration of all things French after World War II, and one of those things was the Christian Dior couture house. Karnow arrived in Paris in 1947 to study, and soon landed a gig writing for Time magazine. One of his assignments was a cover story on Christian Dior, whose company, in less than a decade, had become so successful it was known as the General Motors of Fashion. In the Dior chapter, Karnow beautifully evokes the mechanisms and machinations of a French couture house, and shows how fashion and Paris were deeply intertwined at the time. The rest of the book is a rollicking good read, too.

The accomplished historian of France across the years of Revolution, Empire and Restoration, Munro Price brings all his arsenal of erudition, archival acumen, and intellectual insight to bear on the last crisis of the empire. His attention to detail, his sensitivity to character and motivation make for one of the most penetrating, illuminating accounts of the implosion of support for Napoleon among the French elites ever written. No non-French scholar had picked through the complex politics of late Napoleonic France with as much skill or precision. Price delivers all this in elegant prose, the sign of a subtle historian.

As a St Helena Lullaby puts it, quoted by Horne at the start of his scholarly but eminently readable book, "How far is St Helena from the field of Austerlitz?" Horne is a brilliant historian and he crafts a compelling book tracing Napoleon’s career from its apogee on the field of his greatest victory to its nadir with his exile to St Helena, far out in the south Atlantic. But we don’t just get the events, we get to experience the slippery nature of success, as Spain swallows troops and Russia decimates the Grande Armée. We see this through Napoleon’s own words, and Horne’s relentless research, as he struggles to maintain his dominance. I loved the balanced assessment of this final decade in power. I marvelled at Bonaparte’s brilliance and achievements whilst learning to appreciate how much the odds were stacked against him.

Ask some historians of fascism what book in English they recommend as an introduction to the subject, and, I’d guess, most will recommend Robert O. Paxton’s classic 2004 book-length essay, The Anatomy of Fascism.

Fair enough, but to my mind it is Paxton’s earlier monograph French Peasant Fascism that is his outright masterpiece of historical writing. If you’ve read The Anatomy of Fascism, there’s also the joy of seeing Paxton, in French Peasant Fascism, working out the ideas and themes that animate the later, better-known book. To understand the rightwing Depression-era French farmers known as the Greenshirts, Paxton argues, don’t focus so much on their official programs and doctrinal declarations, but rather watch them in action.

Watch them as they act out their ideology, at the market-day rally or when the taxman comes. 

From her arrival as a fourteen-year-old bride to her death as queen mother fifty-five years later, Catherine de Medici was praised as a devoted wife and mother and able ruler but also condemned as a foreigner, a poisoner, and murderer of Protestants. This rare collection of primary sources translated into English allows readers to become familiar with the sources of such positive and negative assessments of this controversial queen. The letters included here, selected from her many volumes of correspondence, reveal her concerns as a mother and as a political figure.

Excerpts from Venetian ambassadors' gossipy reports bring to light principal figures of the French court--their character, their motives, and political interests. Other sources in the collection extravagantly praise the character and actions of the queen. The several polemical sources included in the collection offer a sharp contrast. The vehement charges leveled against Catherine allow readers to recognize and understand… show more.