100 books like Fugitive Freedom

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. 

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.

This is not just the story of José de León Toral – the man who killed President Álvaro Obregón in 1928 – but the story of the world he inhabited. Often dismissed as a religious fanatic, Robert Weis seeks (in a sense) to redeem Toral by contextualizing him in a very peculiar postrevolutionary cultural milieu: Mexico City’s network of lay Catholics, forced underground by the revolutionary state. Weis masterfully reconstructs this clandestine ecosystem of private masses and informal convents, and their cat-and-mouse games with the agents of state repression. I love the layers of detail, the reconstructions of daily life, and the author’s compassion for his subjects. I was skeptical at first, but by the end I was convinced that Toral’s action was political, and not driven (just) by religious zealotry.

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.

Based largely on interviews conducted by Barnett in the 1980s, this book remains the standard text on the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany. Barnett situates the Confessing Church’s experience within the broader context of the Protestant Churches, which comprised two-thirds of Germany’s population in the Nazi era. Initially formed in response to the German Christian movement’s attempts to Nazify Christianity, the Confessing Church remained committed to the theological integrity and structural independence of the church. Yet Barnett argues that the Confessing Church was not a resistance movement against Nazism itself. Some were arrested and lost their lives, some made compromises with the Nazi regime, and some were antisemitic themselves. Their overlapping and clashing actions complicate the overall portrait of the Confessing Church. A distinctive feature of Barnett’s narrative is the attention given to women—church secretaries, wives of clergy, and the many women who played a greater role in maintaining the… show more.

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.”

Huener has produced a definitive study of the Catholic Church in western Poland under German occupation. Identified by the Germans as the Reichsgau (district) Wartheland or Warthegau, it encompassed 45,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire) with a “population of more than 4.9 million, including approximately 4.2 million Poles, 400,000 Jews, and 325,000 Germans.” Of this demographic, 3.8 million were Catholic and ninety percent were ethnic Poles. The German Reich incorporated the territory even though its borders remained guarded and not easily crossed. It included 1,023 parishes, served by 1,829 diocesan priests, 277 male religious, and 2,666 women religious.

Before World War II ended, the German occupiers would close more than ninety-seven percent of the churches, dissolve all Catholic organizations, deport, or imprison most women religious, and arrest more than 1,500 priests, of whom 815 they murdered directly or indirectly. In eighteen succinct and exceptionally well-written… show more.

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. 

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.

Hendrix tells the incredible story here of how a Lutheran pastor was part of the plot to assassinate Hitler—and almost succeeded.

This is history that's not widely known and the graphic novel format makes it into an accessible adventure story that's actually true. There were many plots to kill Hitler and each failed for different reasons. Yet there were brave people who were willing to keep trying.

Hendricks puts us in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's shoes, while also showing the depth of Nazism's grip on the German public. It took a truly exceptional person to see Hitler for what he was and to decide to act on that understanding.