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.

In this book, Walter Scheidel proficiently exploits the new information that we now have available about wealth inequality in the past to make one bold claim: across history, only catastrophes and large-scale violence (the “Great Leveler”) could significantly reduce economic inequality. Otherwise, the concentration of political power and of coercive force in a few hands also led wealth to become ever more concentrated.

This is a rather depressing view, with which I partially disagree for scientific reasons (as it downplays the importance of human agency and of our collective choices).

Nevertheless, I love this book for its scope, its ambition, and the treasure trove of information about the Classical Age and non-Western societies and cultures that it brings to the debate on wealth inequality in human history.

What if we could detect psychopaths? Like many of Sawyer’s novels (and there are a bunch I could’ve selected for this list), there is a question and then a lightning strike of answers. Not a single bolt, but many, branching off, colliding, bleaching the night. There is plenty of scientific realism here–a personal must for Sawyer–resulting in a far-reaching yet intimate story.

The title is not ‘Night of the Psychopaths’ because the book’s many forks take us deeper into the nature of the human mind and the quantum arena we all play in, whether we know it or not. Oh, and it is still fun, adventuresome, and easier to read than I may have made it sound with all that deep, introspective stuff.

Most people’s idea of lynching is the sanitized version that they have picked up from movies and TV. However, the practice of lynching, as it was carried out in the United States from the late 19th to well into the 20th century, was far more hideous than a few people hanging a man from a tree. This classic contribution concentrates on spectacle lynchings. These were public lynchings attended by hundreds or even thousands of spectators. They involved hours of torture and bodily mutilation, often culminating in the victim being burned alive. Lynching and Spectacle is a vital read for anyone wishing to understand the full horror of American Racism.

Angel of Greenwood is a fantastic young adult novel about two young kids who fall in love in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the cusp of the Tulsa Massacre, a harrowing event in which their prosperous Black community was burnt to the ground by white vigilantes.

By setting a normal teen romance against this backdrop, the reader can appreciate how disruptive racism is to people’s attempts to live a normal life and how lasting the damage can be.