100 books like The Howe Dynasty

By Julie Flavell,

Here are 100 books that The Howe Dynasty fans have personally recommended if you like The Howe Dynasty. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America

James Polchin Author Of Shadow Men: The Tangled Story of Murder, Media, and Privilege That Scandalized Jazz Age America

From my list on crime that reshapes our understanding of the past.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve always liked narrative history and how we can take research and turn it into a story. More importantly, I love books that can recover the histories of marginalized people—people who don’t make it into the history textbooks. Historical true crime gives me access to realities we don’t often see. Court transcripts, detective reports, news accounts, and oral histories all combine to illuminate a world beyond the famous and known. I’m drawn to those books (and book projects) that ask the question: what can we know about the past if we look at it through the lens of a crime? Whose realities do we witness through such a lens? 

James' book list on crime that reshapes our understanding of the past

James Polchin Why did James love this book?

Sweet drew me in from the start with this story of 17-year-old seamstress Lahan Sawyer who was raped in late 18th century New York. The book not only tells us the story of this crime and Sawyer’s courage to press charges but also opens a window into life in that era, from class dynamics to legal proceedings around claims of rape, to the political dynamics of New York in those years after the Revolution.

But what I really love about this book is its narrative force. Sweet renders the world of a New York recovering from war as he speculates and contextualizing Swayer’s life within the broader city, which she had little power to control. 

By John Wood Sweet,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Sewing Girl's Tale as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel - the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape.

Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah's and her assailant's lives. The trial exposed a predatory sexual underworld, sparked riots in the streets, and ignited a vigorous debate about class privilege and sexual double standards.…


Book cover of Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution

Don N. Hagist Author Of The Revolution's Last Men: The Soldiers Behind the Photographs

From my list on people in the American Revolution.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve spent years studying individual people involved in the American Revolution, especially the British soldiers and their wives. These were the people who did the day-to-day work, and their stories deserve to be told. I troll archival collections to find original documents that allow me to piece together the lives of the thousands of individuals who made up the regiments and battalions, focusing not on what they had in common, but on how they were different from each other, part of a military society but each with their own lives and experiences. They made the history happen.

Don's book list on people in the American Revolution

Don N. Hagist Why did Don love this book?

The issues that led to the American Revolution are often oversimplified, and discussion of them can lose the human element, as well as the complexities of the issues and effects they had on real people.

A key example is the quartering of British troops “among the people” in America. The details of this grievance with the British government are widely misunderstood – troops were not quartered in private homes, as is often incorrectly written; instead, the British Quartering Acts constituted an indirect form of taxation.

This book explains the complications and implications of quartering in a wonderfully readable manner, clarifying the perspectives of governments and citizens on both sides. It is a book about people, and how the laws affected them.

By John Gilbert McCurdy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Quarters as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When Americans declared independence in 1776, they cited King George III "for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us." In Quarters, John Gilbert McCurdy explores the social and political history behind the charge, offering an authoritative account of the housing of British soldiers in America. Providing new interpretations and analysis of the Quartering Act of 1765, McCurdy sheds light on a misunderstood aspect of the American Revolution.

Quarters unearths the vivid debate in eighteenth-century America over the meaning of place. It asks why the previously uncontroversial act of accommodating soldiers in one's house became an unconstitutional act. In so…


Book cover of The Boston Massacre: A Family History

Kathleen DuVal Author Of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

From my list on the American Revolution beyond the Founding Fathers.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.

Kathleen's book list on the American Revolution beyond the Founding Fathers

Kathleen DuVal Why did Kathleen love this book?

The Boston Massacre: A Family History takes an event that I thought I knew inside and out, an event I teach in my classes, and tells an entirely new story.

The soldiers who shot the protestors in Boston on a wintery day in 1770 are usually the villains—Paul Revere and other Boston revolutionaries labeled the deaths a “massacre,” after all. But by starting a few years earlier, Zabin shows the British soldiers as young men coming to a colonial town that was also, at the time, British.

They lived in colonial houses, made Bostonian friends, and married Bostonian women. So by the time tensions between the protestors and the British government were accelerating into war, it was a community of friends and families that would be torn apart. 

By Serena Zabin,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked The Boston Massacre as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Historical accuracy and human understanding require coming down from the high ground and seeing people in all their complexity. Serena Zabin’s rich and highly enjoyable book does just that.”—Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal

A dramatic, untold “people’s history” of the storied event that helped trigger the American Revolution.

The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

Professor Serena Zabin…


Book cover of Grand Forage 1778: The Battleground Around New York City

Don N. Hagist Author Of The Revolution's Last Men: The Soldiers Behind the Photographs

From my list on people in the American Revolution.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve spent years studying individual people involved in the American Revolution, especially the British soldiers and their wives. These were the people who did the day-to-day work, and their stories deserve to be told. I troll archival collections to find original documents that allow me to piece together the lives of the thousands of individuals who made up the regiments and battalions, focusing not on what they had in common, but on how they were different from each other, part of a military society but each with their own lives and experiences. They made the history happen.

Don's book list on people in the American Revolution

Don N. Hagist Why did Don love this book?

Books on the war’s campaigns usually aggregate large numbers of people into bland terms like “regiments” and “refugees,” singling out only a few key players as individuals.

This book takes a refreshingly different approach, examining one of the war’s major operations from the level of participants of all sorts, from senior government officials down to the soldiers, civilians, and spies caught up in the fighting. The campaign itself has heretofore been almost entirely overlooked, or seen only in terms of a few of the battles that were part of it.

The result is a vivid account of the many components of a major campaign, and the legions of individuals involved.

By Todd W. Braisted,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Grand Forage 1778 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

After two years of defeats and reverses, 1778 had been a year of success for George Washington and the Continental Army. France had entered the war as the ally of the United States, the British had evacuated Philadelphia, and the redcoats had been fought to a standstill at the Battle of Monmouth. While the combined French-American effort to capture Newport was unsuccessful, it lead to intelligence from British-held New York that indicated a massive troop movement was imminent. British officers were selling their horses and laying in supplies for their men. Scores of empty naval transports were arriving in the…


Book cover of Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It

Jack N. Rakove Author Of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution

From my list on the Revolutionary War and why the British lost it.

Why am I passionate about this?

I became a historian of the American Revolution back in the early 1970s and have been working on that subject ever since. Most of my writings pivot on national politics, the origins of the Constitution, and James Madison. But explaining why the Revolution occurred and why it took the course it did remain subjects that still fascinate me.

Jack's book list on the Revolutionary War and why the British lost it

Jack N. Rakove Why did Jack love this book?

Americans think of the Revolutionary War as a struggle for national liberation. But by 1778 it had become a broader conflict involving the three empires of western Europe. In this Pulitzer Prize Finalist book, Ferreiro restores the international dimensions of the conflict, deftly explaining how a conflict that began as a constitutional struggle within the British Empire escalated into a global war whose last battles would be fought in India.

By Larrie D. Ferreiro,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Brothers at Arms as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History

Winner of the Journal of the American Revolution 2016 Book of the Year Award

The remarkable untold story of how the American Revolution's success depended on substantial military assistance provided by France and Spain, and places the Revolution in the context of the global strategic interests of those nations in their fight against England. 
 
In this groundbreaking, revisionist history, Larrie Ferreiro shows that at the time the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord the colonists had little chance, if any, of militarily defeating the British. The nascent American nation had no navy, little…


Book cover of The American Revolution: A World War

Ray Raphael Author Of Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past

From my list on deepening your view of the American Revolution.

Why am I passionate about this?

When writing my first of my ten books on the Founding Era, A People’s History of the American Revolution, I came across an amazing uprising not celebrated in the traditional saga of our nation’s birth: the people of Massachusetts, everywhere outside of Boston, actually cast off British authority in 1774, the year before Lexington and Concord. How could this critical episode have been so neglected? Who’s the gatekeeper here, anyway? That’s when I began to explore how events of those times morphed into stories, and how those stories mask what actually happened—the theme of Founding Myths.  

Ray's book list on deepening your view of the American Revolution

Ray Raphael Why did Ray love this book?

This book is a game changer. In the traditional telling of the American Revolution, rebellious colonists were the sole agents, save for a bit of help from France. Here, scholars from Spain, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and India, as well as the United States, broaden our perspective. The volume is lavishly produced with historical artwork by the Smithsonian, but this is no ordinary coffee table book. In vivid detail, you will learn that from its very outset, our nation was not a world unto itself. From the nearby Caribbean to Europe to far-away India, the American Revolution played out on a global stage. 

By David K. Allison (editor), Larrie D. Ferreiro (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The American Revolution as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An illustrated collection of essays that explores the international dimensions of the American Revolution and its legacies in both America and around the world

The American Revolution: A World War argues that contrary to popular opinion, the American Revolution was not just a simple battle for independence in which the American colonists waged a "David versus Goliath" fight to overthrow their British rulers. Instead, the essays in the book illustrate how the American Revolution was a much more complicated and interesting conflict. It was an extension of larger skirmishes among the global superpowers in Europe, chiefly Britain, Spain, France, and…


Book cover of The Victory With No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army

Wayne E. Lee Author Of The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800

From my list on war beyond the state.

Why am I passionate about this?

I've been writing about and teaching military history for many years (I'm a professor at the University of North Carolina), mostly focused on the pre-industrial world, and mostly about the maelstrom of the North Atlantic colonial experience (including warfare in Ireland, England, and in North America). I quickly decided that I needed to do more to understand the Native American perspective, and that also meant understanding the very nature of their societies: Not just how they fought, but how they imagined the function of war. This book is the product of constantly returning to that problem, while also putting it into a world comparative context of other non-state experiences of war. 

Wayne's book list on war beyond the state

Wayne E. Lee Why did Wayne love this book?

Of all the books on my list, this is the one closest in subject to mine. 

Calloway tells the story of the first war fought by the United States after the American Revolution, but he tells it from the perspective of the Native coalition that fought it. It is a powerfully told story about how Native Americans understood the international politics in which they lived and then how they mustered the force to try to change those politics.

Unlike most writers on Native American warfare, Calloway understands logistics and how they shaped that war from both sides. This issue is also central to my book. 

Book cover of Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

Jonathan Charteris-Black Author Of Metaphors of Brexit: No Cherries on the Cake?

From my list on the truth of the origins, issues, passions of Brexit.

Why am I passionate about this?

If there was ever one word that seems to have changed the foundations of modern Britain it is the word 'Brexit': something that had seemed so antediluvian shifted from being impossible to becoming reality. I could not believe this was happening and I wanted to explore the influence of language in creating this reality. I decided to apply the approach I had originally authored known as Critical Metaphor Analysis to unravel the metaphors through which the arguments of Leavers and Remainers were articulated. In doing so I tried to tell the story of Brexit through its metaphors because the role of language itself is often overlooked in accounts of persuasion.

Jonathan's book list on the truth of the origins, issues, passions of Brexit

Jonathan Charteris-Black Why did Jonathan love this book?

Written from a standpoint outside of Britain yet offering such great insight, this book offers a highly convincing account of the stupidity of Brexit. The author pours his wrath onto Brexit and Brexiteers and is a brilliant polemicist. It’s well-written and entertaining.

What I like about this book is that, unlike a lot of academic writing, it doesn't pull any punches and the author is rhetorically committed to a single perspective that he adheres to with great consistency.

By Fintan O'Toole,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Heroic Failure as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style' The Times.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR.

'A quite brilliant dissection of the cultural roots of the Brexit narrative' David Miliband.
'Hugely entertaining and engrossing' Roddy Doyle.
'Best book about the English that I've read for ages' Billy Bragg.
'A wildly entertaining but uncomfortable read... Pitilessly brilliant' Jonathan Coe.

In exploring the answers to the question: 'why did Britain vote leave?', Fintan O'Toole finds himself discovering how trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose…


Book cover of A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

Patricia Goldstone Author Of Aaronsohn's Maps: The Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Modern Middle East

From my list on changing discussions about the modern Middle East.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated by the Middle East ever since being taken to see Kismet at the age of 3. I travel there extensively, married into it, and have lived inside the Middle East community in the US for the past thirty years. I’m also a journalist, a playwright, and the author of three non-fiction books, Making the World Safe for Tourism, Aaronsohn’s Maps, and INTERLOCK: Art, Conspiracy, and The Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. Although I wouldn't argue that the issue of women’s rights isn't an urgent one, as a woman who focuses on history and geopolitics, I’m often disturbed at how it's being used to whip up popular emotion and obscure other driving forces. 

Patricia's book list on changing discussions about the modern Middle East

Patricia Goldstone Why did Patricia love this book?

Like Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to which this compares in the breadth of scope and depth of knowledge, this is a huge, rich feast of a book and one of the best you can read on World War I as well as on the formative geopolitics of the modern Middle East. Like the greatest of the imperial geographers, David’s scholarship was omnivorous but his original discipline was law: his discussion of the rashly-drawn boundaries that are at the heart of A Peace to End All Peace is without peer.

Full disclosure: David was also a friend who, like his book, was incredibly generous. I owe my book to a particularly compendious footnote in A Peace to End All Peace. It caught my eye and I became obsessed with why I didn’t know more about such an enormous presence, eventually traveling to Britain, France, Israel, and the Isle…

By David Fromkin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Peace to End All Peace as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An up-to-date analysis of the historical background to the divisions of the Arab world. For politics students and the general reader.


Book cover of The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States and Postwar Imperialism

Jeffrey Herf Author Of Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949

From my list on history of establishment of the State of Israel.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian at the University of Maryland, College Park. In the past forty years, I have published six books and many articles on twentieth-century German history including Reactionary Modernism: Technology Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich; Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys; Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World; and Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989. My personal interest in German history began at home. My father was one of those very fortunate German Jews who found refuge in the United States before Hitler closed the borders and launched the Holocaust. 

Jeffrey's book list on history of establishment of the State of Israel

Jeffrey Herf Why did Jeffrey love this book?

Louis’s excellent, and now classic work, should play a far larger role in discussions of the meanings of imperialism and anti-imperialism than has been the case in recent years. Drawing on a deep grasp of British foreign policy and domestic politics, Louis examines what he calls the “grand strategy of non-intervention and conciliation” that leaned heavily towards the existing Arab regimes. Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and especially Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and other leading officials in the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office, believed that a Jewish state in Palestine would antagonize the Arabs and lead to a decline in British influence in the Middle East. Louis draws attention to Richard Crossman and other British critics of the policy of preserving Britain’s imperial role in Palestine. It is one of those indispensable works of scholarship regarding these events.

By Wm. Roger Louis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book, which examines British disengagement in the Middle East during the Labour Government of 1945-51, is in a large sense a comment on the British response to Arab, Jewish, and Iranian nationalism.


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