Here are 100 books that The Comanche Empire fans have personally recommended if you like
The Comanche Empire.
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I am a translator specializing in Chinese historical novels, and also an academic researching marginalized groups in Chinese history—ethnic minorities, the disabled, people with mental health issues, and so on. The treatment of marginalized people tells you a lot about what is going on within mainstream society. I’ve always been interested in stories about people from distant times and places, and I have a particular love of long sagas, something that you can really get your teeth into. Kingdoms in Peril covers five hundred years of history: I translated this for my own enjoyment and was surprised when I realized that I’d managed to write 850,000 words for fun!
Four times the sun has died and been reborn, and now we are living in the world of the fifth sun.
In this wonderful imaginative rendering of Aztec history, we move between mythological and real time, following the Mexica people as they gain power and establish a great kingdom, and then suffer the disaster of Spanish attack. The voices of many different people speak through this story, men and women, telling us of the price that they paid each step of the way in the struggle to survive in a beautiful but brutal world.
In November 1519, Hernando Cortes walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story-and the story of what happened afterwards-has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by…
I’m a born-and-bred New Englander and I teach history at Barnard College, Columbia University. I have always loved sailing and the ocean, so I’m fascinated with the early modern Age of Sail. My focus is the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic World, when the histories of the Americas, Europe, and Africa became permanently entangled. My first book, The Saltwater Frontier, won the Bancroft Prize in American History in 2016. My second book, The Life and Times of Squanto, is hitting bookshelves in Fall 2024.
The Seven Years’ War is obscure in the American historical imagination: if it’s remembered at all, it’s as a hazy, unimportant flintlocks-and-tomahawks event.
In this gripping, masterful narrative, Fred Anderson leaves his reader with no doubt of just how momentous this conflict was. He examines imperial, colonial, and indigenous actors to explain how the French were expelled from North America and how the war’s aftermath was a catalyst for both Native and colonial resistance to British rule.
Arguably the first world war, it could also be called the war that made America.
In this vivid and compelling narrative, the Seven Years' War–long seen as a mere backdrop to the American Revolution–takes on a whole new significance. Relating the history of the war as it developed, Anderson shows how the complex array of forces brought into conflict helped both to create Britain’s empire and to sow the seeds of its eventual dissolution.
Beginning with a skirmish in the Pennsylvania backcountry involving an inexperienced George Washington, the Iroquois chief Tanaghrisson, and the ill-fated French emissary Jumonville, Anderson reveals a chain of events that would lead to world conflagration. Weaving together the military, economic, and…
I’m a legal historian with a particular interest in eighteenth-century Britain and the United States. My research has investigated the history of arbitration, historical connections between law and politics, and changing attitudes to the rule of law. Since 2018, I’ve been a professor at Notre Dame Law School, where I teach courses in legal history, civil procedure, conflict of laws, and the rule of law.
The Seven Years’ War was a pivotal event in the formation of the British Empire, but histories of the conflict often omit a crucial battleground: Jamaica.
Starting in 1760, enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off their captivity. Tacky’s Revolt, as the uprising became known, was the greatest slave rebellion the Atlantic world had yet seen. It was also linked to other, global struggles, both in Africa and between European empires.
In Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown links these hyper-local and imperial stories. I found it particularly useful for understanding the complexities of race and ethnicity in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Elsa Goveia Book Prize Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations Winner of the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize Winner of the Harriet Tubman Prize Winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award Finalist for the Cundill Prize
A gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I have loved history since I was a child, and very early on, I realized that history was not something that was made only by famous people. My own relatives had migrated, worked at different jobs, served in wars, etc., and ordinary people like them have been the most important drivers of events. I had a chance to study in Mexico in my early twenties and rapidly fell in love with its people and history. Yet, ever since I was a child, I have been interested in the history of wars. My work on the Mexican-American War combines all of these passions.
I really enjoyed this terrific book about how the US political conflicts led to a foreign war against Mexico and how that war became increasingly unpopular.
Greenberg shows how characters like the charismatic Henry Clay, the young, almost unknown congressman Abraham Lincoln, and the dark horse president James Polk jousted on the national stage. This is a great read, especially for anyone with an interest in the intersection of biography and history.
Our 1846 war with Mexico was a blatant land grab provoked by President James Polk. And while it secured the entire Southwest and California for America, it also exacerbated regional tensions over slavery, created the first significant antiwar movement in America, and helped lead the nation into civil war. A Wicked War is the definitive history of this conflict that turned America into a continental power. Amy Greenberg describes the battles between American and Mexican armies, but also delineates the political battles between Democrats and Whigs—the former led by the ruthless Polk, the latter by the charismatic Henry Clay, and…
The past fascinates me because it is strange and different to the world we live in today. That is why I prefer looking at earlier centuries than contemporary times because the distant past requires an extra effort on our part to unlock how people back then made sense of their world. When I read an old chronicle on how Indigenous people spent days traveling to meet acquaintances and even strangers, it piqued my interest. Did they really need to meet face-to-face? What did traveling mean to them? The books on the list below are attempts by historians to understand the travelers of the past.
American Passage’s portrayal of early New England as a fluid frontier where people, goods, and information traveled is excellent.
I like how Grandjean retells the English settlement of the region in terms of how people moved and communicated with one another. She forces readers to rethink our ideas of settler colonialism. In reality, English settlements were tiny islands in a vast sea of Indian lands.
New England was built on letters. Its colonists left behind thousands of them, brittle and browning and crammed with curls of purplish script. How they were delivered, though, remains mysterious. We know surprisingly little about the way news and people traveled in early America. No postal service or newspapers existed-not until 1704 would readers be able to glean news from a "public print." But there was, in early New England, an unseen world of travelers, rumors, movement, and letters. Unearthing that early American communications frontier, American Passage retells the story of English colonization as less orderly and more precarious than…
The past fascinates me because it is strange and different to the world we live in today. That is why I prefer looking at earlier centuries than contemporary times because the distant past requires an extra effort on our part to unlock how people back then made sense of their world. When I read an old chronicle on how Indigenous people spent days traveling to meet acquaintances and even strangers, it piqued my interest. Did they really need to meet face-to-face? What did traveling mean to them? The books on the list below are attempts by historians to understand the travelers of the past.
I like Borders and Freedom because Scholz shows a different way of interpreting political borders and territories.
Most people would think that toll stations would be located at the boundary between states. But Scholz illustrates how they were actually located well within the borders of political territories because channeling movement was far more important than maintaining fixed boundaries.
In the Holy Roman Empire 'no prince... can forbid men passage in the common road', wrote the English jurist John Selden. In practice, moving through one the most fractured landscapes in human history was rarely as straightforward as suggested by Selden's account of the German 'liberty of passage'.
Across the Old Reich, mobile populations-from emperors to peasants-defied attempts to channel their mobility with actions ranging from mockery to bloodshed. In this study, Luca Scholz charts this contentious ordering of movement through the lens of safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key…
The past fascinates me because it is strange and different to the world we live in today. That is why I prefer looking at earlier centuries than contemporary times because the distant past requires an extra effort on our part to unlock how people back then made sense of their world. When I read an old chronicle on how Indigenous people spent days traveling to meet acquaintances and even strangers, it piqued my interest. Did they really need to meet face-to-face? What did traveling mean to them? The books on the list below are attempts by historians to understand the travelers of the past.
While Bárbaros is a classic in borderland studies, it is not stuffy and boring at all.
The stories and details in the book give life to what happened a long time ago in distant lands. Weber shows readers how dynamic and fluid Spanish borderlands in the Americas really were. I particularly find it fascinating how the book reveals people’s flexibility in the face of seemingly rigid colonial categories.
A majestic exploration of Bourbon Spain's efforts to come to terms with the native peoples of the Americas, from Argentina to Alaska
Two centuries after Cortes and Pizarro seized the Aztec and Inca empires, Spain's conquest of America remained unfinished. Indians retained control over most of the lands in Spain's American empire. Mounted on horseback, savvy about European ways, and often possessing firearms, independent Indians continued to find new ways to resist subjugation by Spanish soldiers and conversion by Spanish missionaries.
In this panoramic study, David J. Weber explains how late eighteenthcentury Spanish administrators tried to fashion a more enlightened…
The past fascinates me because it is strange and different to the world we live in today. That is why I prefer looking at earlier centuries than contemporary times because the distant past requires an extra effort on our part to unlock how people back then made sense of their world. When I read an old chronicle on how Indigenous people spent days traveling to meet acquaintances and even strangers, it piqued my interest. Did they really need to meet face-to-face? What did traveling mean to them? The books on the list below are attempts by historians to understand the travelers of the past.
Unwanted Neighbours is a captivating look at the frontier interactions between the Mughals and the Portuguese.
I like how Flores breaks the typical division between maritime and overland empires. The Mughal Empire was as much maritime as it was territorial, and the Portuguese maritime empire had an overland side to it as well.
The stories of cross-cultural relations in the book give texture to the past and help readers imagine the complexities of the characters in Mughal India.
In December 1572 the Mughal emperor Akbar arrived in the port city of Khambayat. Having been raised in distant Kabul, Akbar, in his thirty years, had never been to the ocean. Presumably anxious with the news about the Mughal military campaign in Gujarat, several Portuguese merchants in Khambayat rushed to Akbar's presence. This encounter marked the beginning of a long, complex, and unequal relationship between a continental Muslim empire that was expanding into south India, often looking back to Central Asia, and a European Christian maritime empire whose rulers considered themselves 'kings of the sea'.
I am passionate about bringing back to life persons from the past who have been forgotten, misunderstood, or even deliberately mischaracterized. In order to get to the truth, there are a host of myths that must be shattered or discarded. Most of the histories that I have written have done precisely this–showing the fallacy of familiar myths and discovering the hidden truths about people and events that have been distorted, often by some of the most popular literature. In order to achieve these results, I have had to spend years in “boring” archives in order to reveal people and events that are never boring.
I’ve been hearing about Cynthia Ann Parker since I was a child growing up in the part of northern Texas once ruled by her Comanche captors–and her Comanche compatriots! Captured as a child by Comanche raiders at the Parker family’s frontier compound at the time of the Texas Revolution, Cynthia Ann fully became a Comanche. She married a warrior, Peta Nocona, and together they had a son, “Quanah Parker,” who eventually became the most famous “Indian” in America.
I was amazed by the authors’ ability to penetrate the myths surrounding Cynthia’s recapture by Texas Rangers. Speaking virtually no English, she was desperate to return with her infant daughter to her Comanche family, but both of them died in captivity, being held now as sad, unwilling captives of the Texans.
In December 1860, along a creek in northwest Texas, a group of U.S. Cavalry under Sgt. John Spangler and Texas Rangers led by Sul Ross raided a Comanche hunting camp, killed several Indians, and took three prisoners. One was the woman they would identify as Cynthia Ann Parker, taken captive from her white family as a child a quarter century before. The reports of these events had implications far and near. For Ross, they helped make a political career. For Parker, they separated her permanently and fatally from her Comanche husband and two of her children. For Texas, they became…
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
The United States Old West is a legend, a myth, a land of contradictions. I grew up and have never left this vast land of scorching deserts, soaring peaks, misty coasts, and redwoods that touch the heavens. I grew up on the myths – Tombstone, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Pearl Hart. What I love most are the stories of the women of the West, who survive with grit, wiles, and no small amount of courage. I love finding the lesser known women through novels and research and seeing their lives bloom before my eyes. Cowgirls, sufragettes, doctors, ex-slaves, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, cattle rustlers, homesteaders, dancehall girls.
The Comanche Kid is a breathtaking book that follows Jane, who witnesses her family's murder and her sister's kidnapping during a Comanche raid.
She disguises herself as her brother and embarks on a journey to find her sister and seek revenge. Along the way, she joins a cattle drive, encountering cowboys, Buffalo soldiers, and Comanches, experiencing the beauty and wrath of the West.
This intense novel fearlessly exposes the atrocities committed by all parties, while highlighting the destructive nature of vengeance. Nonetheless, it remains a compassionate tale of bravery and forgiveness. Trust me on this – you will not forget this novel. It’s on my shelf next to True Grit.
An epic new western in the grand tradition of True Grit and Lonesome Dove. A 2022 Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist for Best Traditional Western Novel.
"The best western I’ve read in a long, long time. Though a first novel, Daniels writes with the sure hand of an old-pro. His voice is authentic and riveting. I can’t recommend this one more highly!” - Peter Brandvold, author of over 70 westerns, including 11 Lou Prophet novels & 15 Sheriff Ben Stillman westerns.
Out of nowhere Comanches attack—and sixteen year-old Jane narrowly survives the slaughter of her family and the…
