100 books like No Duty to Retreat

When folks think of the late 1800s West, they think of many things–cowboys, railroads, ranches, gunslingers, and more–but they rarely think about big cities. Bill Cronon’s stunning book forever changes that.

He demonstrates that pretty much no corner of the West could escape the shadow of Chicago–the looming metropolis that ordered so much of Western life. Cows, cowboys, and ranchers all bowed to the Chicago meatpackers. Just about every Western railroad stopped in the city. And farmers across the West planted their fields based on the prices at the Chicago Board of Trade.

Cronon masterfully shows that country and city weren’t polar opposites but two sides of the same coin.

We tend to remember the railroad tycoons of the late 1800s in one of two ways–good or bad.

In the first, we imagine the Vanderbilts, Stanfords, and Goulds as the brilliant architects of the modern economy, “The Men Who Built America”–to quote the History Channel show. In the second, we imagine them as unscrupulous robber barons, evil geniuses who created the unequal corporate America that we still live in today. But what if both explanations give the railroad men far too much credit and responsibility?

In Richard White’s scathing and often hilarious book, he showcases these larger-than-life figures as bumbling, corrupt, and often bringing ruin and bankruptcy to their shareholders. They weren’t the mighty octopus we remember, but “a group of fat men in an octopus suit,” whose “tentacles of steel were as likely to be slapping at each other.”

The iconic mythology of the American Wild West–of cowboys and Indians, sunset shootouts, one-horse frontier towns–wasn’t something created after this tumultuous period of history, but actually during it. And no single figure of the day did more to popularize these images than William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a scout and showman who became one of the most famous people on earth in the late 1800s.

Historian Louis Warren's mind-blowing biography of Cody shows this larger-than-life figure as a bundle of contradictions. Here’s just one example. By our standards today, Cody’s glorification of white settlers pushing aside Native inhabitants would be revolting and racist. But the showman employed hundreds of Lakota Sioux in his Wild West show, even including Sitting Bull–the same man who had earlier defeated Custer at Little Bighorn. 

I can’t tell you how often I hear people talking about an Old West–an era imagined as distinct from a New West that followed. Spoiler alert–that makes no sense. No author does a better job blowing up this fantasy than Patty Limerick, who argues that there’s a single throughline in Western history–that of conquest by external forces, usually the federal government or big businesses from Wall Street.

You’ll never think of the West in the same after reading this powerful book.

On May 8, 1970, just days after the killing of four college students at Kent State University, construction workers in New York City violently attacked a group that had gathered to protest the Vietnam War.

Kuhn offers a riveting account of the events (dubbed the “Hardhat Riot” by some and “Workers’ Woodstock” by others), but he also situates them into a broader story of how the war and other developments of the 1960s exacerbated divisions within the Democratic Party between white, heavily unionized blue-collar workers in the urban North and an emerging class of college-educated professionals. 

Nixon successfully courted many of the blue-collar workers on the way to his landslide victory in 1972. Kuhn is no apologist for the workers, but he also avoids facile stereotypes about the white working class, some of which persist to this day.  

Welcome to Hard Times is a shorter novel. It is of the length of the classic western that was popular at the time that this novel came out (1960). This novel is sometimes described as an anti-western or an ironic western, as it takes a non-heroic view of people dealing with evil in a frontier town. It was made into a movie by the same title, but the movie is not well known. The novel is similar in tone to the movie McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which some people do not like because of its non-heroic or skeptical tone. Readers who like their westerns upbeat and unequivocal may not appreciate Doctorow’s novel, but readers who are willing to consider less-than-pristine views may find an interesting treatment here.

Arias’ book is the product of nine years of intensive ethnographic research in three favelas (shanty towns) of Rio de Janeiro. This enables him to assess how local community leaders deal with the parallel power of drug gangs that become entrenched in their neighborhoods. Unable to rely on the police, who are violent and corrupt, community leaders are forced to find ways to coexist with actors who represent a substantial financial and military threat to their authority. In terms of methodology, this is a really impressive piece of research!

The editors of this volume are two of the most important and influential medical anthropologists in the world and major scholars of violence. In addition to collecting a set of useful texts on violence, the introduction to the volume is a piece of writing that I have returned to many times.

Why did anti-Chinese violence continue to rise even after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, reaching a terrible peak in 1885 and 1886?

In a powerful reinterpretation of Chinese exclusion, Beth Lew-Williams reveals how the 1882 act was deliberately limited in scope, poorly funded, and loosely enforced—because immigration policy at this time was still governed by diplomacy. Only in the late 1880s, with China perceived as weak, did the US unilaterally abrogate its treaty obligations and move toward outright exclusion.

The chronology really matters here: for Chinese immigrants it was a question not just of entry or exclusion, but of life and death. Deftly situating anti-Chinese violence in overlapping regional, national, and international contexts, Lew Williams shows how the idea of the immigrant “alien” emerged in tandem with national citizenship during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. 

The Brides of Dracula are a classic overlooked group. Most adaptations treat them like a sexy slideshow of danger, not allowed to do anything other than lust and hunger. They’re a flattened idea of feminine desire, put on Dracula’s leash.

S.T. Gibson breathes them to life (or undeath) by imagining what their long existence is like, constantly under a temperamental abuser’s thumb. Yes, they are angry and hungry, and they yearn, but it’s a deeply human yearning for more than companionship. You root for them to be the ones to plunge knives into the count’s heart.