100 books like For Christ and Country

In this masterpiece of historical narrative, Paul Sullivan investigates the 1875 sacking of a sugar plantation (called Xuxub) and the murder of its American manager by Maya rebels. Located on the geographical frontier between “Ladino” and Maya society, Xuxub became a microcosm of all of the conflicts that haunted Mexico as it entered its “Guilded Age”: inter-elite rivalries, international competition in the wake of the U.S.-Mexico War, and the overwhelming fear that the nation’s Indigenous population would rise up against encroaching liberal capitalism. It all comes together in a murder mystery, written more like true crime than an academic text, right down to the final poetic twist. This is an immensely enjoyable read, so much so that I have read it no fewer than fifteen times. 

In my opinion, Bill Taylor is the greatest living American historian of Mexico. He has written big books and small books, all brilliant, all canonical, and his latest is no exception. In this labor of love, he traces the lives of two charlatans wandering the Mexican countryside, living and suffering by their wits, usually impersonating priests. The stories, in themselves, go nowhere: our two lowlife protagonists bounce from town to town, jail to jail, and never learn a thing or reach an epiphany; but taken together they paint a picture of Spanish American society as exceptionally mobile, and dysfunctionally unstable. Marked by displacement, dislocation, and immigration, New Spain gave birth to the picaresque novel, rooted in an abiding sense that nothing was ever as it seemed. This is Taylor’s real reward: a glimpse at two unpolished, real-life pícaros in the historical record.

On May 20, 2004, a relatively “ordinary” teenager and two of his friends murdered his mother, his father, and his little sister. Unraveling the triple murder, investigative journalist Sandra Rodríguez Nieto paints a brilliant portrait of Ciudad Juárez in 2004 – a city just about to become the world’s murder capital. However, even before it became the central battleground for Mexico’s competing organized crime groups, Juárez fostered a milieu of violence, rooted in impunity. In beautiful prose, Rodríguez Nieto argues that Vicente and his friends were practically driven to murder by an overwhelming sense of impunity, which “taught us that any and every savage crime was fair game.” This book is not so much about the so-called “drug war” as it is about the social world it has come to inhabit.

Maybe not the littlest story, but this is a classic. What begins as a pretty straightforward story of Spanish conquest and conversion takes an (even more) sinister turn in 1562, when Franciscan priests find bones and idols in a clandestine ceremonial center. What follows is a full-blown, informal Inquisition, in which Franciscan priests tortured thousands of innocent Maya, disabled thousands more, and burned 17 Maya codices, creating a “hall of mirrors” in which conquistadores were forced to beg priests to take mercy on the Indigenous peoples. Inga Clendinnen probes the psyche of the Inquisition’s mastermind, Bishop Diego de Landa – a man sent to Yucatán to protect the Maya – and draws some shocking and disturbing conclusions, not only about the man, but about impunity and corruption in the colonial project. I am convinced she is the only historian who could have written this book.

This book, more than any other, inspired me to become a historian of Renaissance Italy.

Richard Trexler reveals that, far from being secular minded, the inhabitants of Florence relied on religion, ritual behavior, and charisma to create and maintain urban life, social values, and civic order.

By turns anthropological as well as historical, Trexler uncovers the ritual behaviors and practices that tied the city together from the level of the cosmos to the everyday relations between friends, neighbors, and family members. The central purpose of all public ritual in Florence served to overcome the inherent weakness of a republican government in a world of gods and kings. 

Well over 200,000 books have been written about Napoleon, but this recent work actually manages to say something new by focusing on an aspect of his reign that has been oddly neglected – at least in the English-speaking world – his tense and turbulent relations with the Pope, Pius VII, which ended with the Pope’s kidnapping from Rome by French forces in 1809 and imprisonment in France. Though bullied, browbeaten, and even once physically manhandled by Napoleon, the elderly Pontiff steadfastly refused to make the concessions to the secular power that his captor demanded from him. Ambrogio Caiani not only brings vividly to life an extraordinary clash of personalities, but also a key episode in one of the great conflicts that has shaped the modern world: the rivalry between church and state.

Talk about a badass. In 1956, 16-year-old Ellery Schempp protested his school’s mandatory prayer and Bible-reading period by reading silently from the Koran. He was kicked out of class and sued his school district, insisting that the First Amendment barred it from promoting a particular religious creed. Eventually, in Abington v. Schempp, the Supreme Court agreed. But along the way, kids called Schempp and his family “Commies” (it was the 1950s, remember) and his principal tried to get Tufts University to rescind its admission offer to him. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court permitted a football coach and devout Christian to pray on the field after games. It’s worth asking what would have happened if—like Schempp—the coach was reciting a Muslim prayer instead. 

In The Florentine Magnates we looked at Florence’s magnates, the powerful ruling class. Now we get a look at the people they lorded it over—the “popolo minuto” or the little people. We see them struggling, never able to get far enough ahead to get through a bad harvest, a year of terrible weather, or an epidemic with any security. Both church and commune recognized the need to come to the assistance of the masses of poor; this book tells us how they went about it and how successful they were (or weren’t). It deftly traces the role of religious confraternities in Florence’s charitable institutions. It’s been described as “one of the most detailed analyses of charity in late medieval Italy.”

I read this book years ago in high school, and my eyes were opened. The hero, Julien Sorel, is—like I was when I read the novel—naïve, confused, trusting, inexperienced, and prone to awkwardness and error. In short, I could relate to someone in circumstances (boarding school!) where I desperately needed someone who was highly imperfect with whom I could identify.

It might have been the first time I read an adult book where I felt I might actually meet the main character one day, walking down the street or even in the hallway.

Knowing our history is so important, and this is one of the best books on the history of Christian nationalism in the United States during the 20th century.

What becomes so clear is the cultural influences on American Christianity including which voices are lifted up, and which ones are ignored or silenced. Let’s just say you won’t ever look at Billy Graham and his work the same way again.