100 books like King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther

Who would have thought that late-nineteenth-century Poles’ preoccupation with the problem of prostitution could reveal so much about the Polish mindset? Concerns over the sex industry arose during a period of rapid change when there was no Polish state. Poles voiced their concerns about their nation’s future—and their womenfolk. A historian at the height of her powers, Keely Stauter-Halsted skillfully shows how debates on prostitution and an obsession with the bodies of impoverished women reflected a variety of visions of a future Poland.

This moving book gives insightful and humane treatment to a difficult, even taboo, subject: the cell life of female prisoners during the Stalinist period. Empathetic as well as eloquent, Anna Müller relies on numerous interviews as well as archival sources to piece together the world of the prison cell. While seemingly at the mercy of the guards and interrogation officers, back in their shared cell women prisoners are shown to seize upon what agency they had and actively shape their imprisoned existence. This is a book you won’t soon forget.

While there are many treatments of the Polish-German borderlands, this pioneering work integrates borderlands and colonial history. Here medicine, migration, and colonization intersect in interesting ways. Among other things, it is striking to see how the colonized Poles, finding themselves in between the Germans and the native populations, also sought to be colonizers overseas. This is a shining example of transnational history.

From mud and muck to modernity? This elegant examination of the margins of interwar Poland sheds much light on the ins and outs of belonging as well as broader Polish ambitions of being considered part of the civilized world. While Kathryn Ciancia focuses on the push to modernize the ethnically complex eastern borderland that was the province of Volhynia, inhabited by Jews and Ukrainians as well as Poles, she also importantly situates Poland within a global framework.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.