Love The Historian’s Craft? Readers share 100 books like The Historian’s Craft...

This brilliant book summarizes the history of Indigenous people in this country. It was written by a person with Indigenous heritage who participated in global Indigenous movements for over four decades.

I wish I had had this book accessible when I studied Native American history long ago with Western Cherokee Professor Dr. David Edmunds. 

This award-winning book provides a new way to understand Native people and why they have struggled so tenaciously for their human rights, even in a country that promotes itself as the world’s beacon of democracy. I recommend it unequivocally to everyone.

A Passion for History is a conversation between Natalie Zemon Davis, a prominent historian and an extraordinary woman, with Denis Crouzet, also a historian and a sharp observer. Above all, they discuss how to do research, write, and teach history. In addition, Natalie Zemon Davis shares her memories of being an ambitious Jewish girl in America of the 40s and her way to combine academic aspirations with family life, and her views on other subjects, such as politics, feminism, cinema, and freedom. This lively dialogue of two remarkable intellectuals is a thrilling read.

In a biography of a person whose occupation was to think, the most exciting part is how their thought evolved. Robin G. Collingwood is a prominent philosopher and a historian of Roman Britain. His autobiography is precious because it is an earnest reflection on how his perception of history and the approaches to its study developed over his lifetime - a door open into the mind of a philosopher of history.

This book is a classic, and I wish I had read it even earlier than I did. 

One of the most prominent historians of the 20th century, E.H. Carr, delves into the intricacies of exploring the past. He articulates the significance of interpreting personal memories, discusses how historical ideas are constructed, and examines the impact of a historian's personality on the history they write. These complicated ideas are given in a calm tone and a simple way.

A total must-read for people interested in history!

This book is a reflection on the nature of historical research and the perils of history in the postmodern age. An influential current in the study of history has abandoned the aspiration of getting close to the truth and accepts ideologically motivated accounts of the past as equally valuable narratives. The repercussions of the controversy on ‘post-truth’ reach far beyond the limits of the academic world and are ubiquitous in contemporary Western society. Richard J. Evans knows that from his own experience, having served as an expert witness in Irwing v Penguin Books and Lipstadt libel case, relating to Holocaust denial. The book offers a lucid analysis of the conflicting trends in the theory and practice of historical research. It links between the study of the past and the possibility of attaining certainty on present-day issues.

Upon opening this book, I was quickly caught up in Jahren’s lovely prose. Her story is one of a woman trying to make a career in plant biology despite struggles with mental health, sexism, and lack of funding, but it’s the way she tells the story – lyrically and with such vivid imagery – that makes it such an excellent read.

I think this is a brilliant and, for me, unforgettable novel. It took an aspect of Ottoman history that I knew about as dry fact and imprinted it on my heart. I was fascinated by the daily lives of varied peoples in one small Ottoman town, how intertwined they were, even writing one language in the alphabet of another.

They tell their own stories of love and ambition, family and friendship, and how the Great War and its aftermath tore them apart. It reads like an epic unfolding through the eyes and voices of ordinary people, humane, evocative, humorous and brutal. 

This fascinating book by the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould taught me so much about what good non-fiction writing looks like.

Although it is strictly a science book, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle is history, philosophy, and storytelling at its best. It illustrates how complex metaphors work in our conceptualization about the past, time as following a repeating cycle and time as linear, forward moving.

Using the concepts of arrow and cycle, Gould explores the discovery of “deep time” a few hundred years ago. The almost unfathomable age of the earth and the universe was a shock and had monumental consequences for our understanding of human history, just a short bubble of existence.

This book also excels in imploding some of the myths that arise about scientific discoveries and the stories we tell about them.

Marc Bloch was a prominent French historian, who specialized in Medieval social history during the years between the two world wars of the twentieth century. He was a major figure in the formation of the “Annales School” which focused on the study of history with an emphasis on long-term developments in social history. Of Alsatian-Jewish background, he wrote the book Strange Defeat during the summer of 1940, following the rapid defeat and conquest of France by Nazi Germany. Bloch’s book was published in France after the war, in 1946, but he did not live to see it. He was able to maintain a professorial position at the University of Montpelier in southern France but, after joining the Resistance, was captured, tortured, and executed in 1944. In Strange Defeat, Bloch examined the long-term causes of the 1940 defeat, focusing on the failure of the French military leadership to adjust to… show more.

An instant best-seller when it first appeared in 1978, Montaillou uses Inquisition records of the cross-examinations of Cathar heretics and their Catholic neighbours and kin to recover the religious, social, emotional and sexual lives of medieval Pyrenean villagers.

Shepherds, mayors, matriarchs and servants, priests and laity, come vividly to life as they recount their work and pleasures, friendships and enmities, doubts and beliefs. 

Montaillou is the most influential example of what was then a speciality of the French Annales school of history, namely, studies of everyday life (la vie quotidienne) in a particular historical milieu.

Since then micro-histories, detailed accounts of social microcosms and what they tell us about the wider worlds in which they were embedded, and the historical shifts or transformations to which they bear witness, have become the bread and butter not only of local but of global historians.