Here are 100 books that The Specter of the Archive fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
Finding yourself overwhelmed, confused, or just plain curious about artificial intelligence?
Then this is the book for you! Wiggins and Jones provide a lucid, comprehensive overview of how we arrived at our current data-saturated times and how artificial intelligence emerged from the political climate of the Cold War as one attempt in a longer history of the ties between political power and information.
I found myself constantly surprised and enlightened by the history of data sketched out by Wiggins and Jones!
From facial recognition-capable of checking us onto flights or identifying undocumented residents-to automated decision systems that inform everything from who gets loans to who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn't just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.
Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing…
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
How and why do states keep secrets? Soll provides powerful and, at times, surprising answers to this question by turning to the absolutist governments of early modern Europe, and specifically the administrator Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
As the key minister of state under King Louis XIV, Colbert built a powerful system of information collection and control that, in many ways, anticipated the modern national security state. If you want to make sense of government collection of data and state secrecy today, Soll’s book is a must-read.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert saw governance of the state not as the inherent ability of the king, but as a form of mechanical mastery of subjects such as medieval legal history, physics, navigation, and the price lists of nails, sails, and gunpowder. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state.
This innovative book argues that Colbert's practice of collecting knowledge originated in Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship and trade. By connecting historical literatures-archives, libraries, merchant techniques,…
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
How do citizens learn to accept violence perpetuated by their own governments? Answering this profoundly relevant and timely question lies at the heart of Linstrum’s book–and data lies at the crux of the answer. He shows how, despite massive amounts of data about colonial violence circulating in postwar Britain, British people found ways to accommodate and justify that violence.
This book is a sobering challenge to the belief that better information produces better and more empathetic societies, showing that the connection between knowledge and enlightened behavior is not nearly as straightforward as we may want to believe.
An eye-opening account of how violence was experienced not just on the frontlines of colonial terror but at home in imperial Britain.
When uprisings against colonial rule broke out across the world after 1945, Britain responded with overwhelming and brutal force. Although this period has conventionally been dubbed "postwar," it was punctuated by a succession of hard-fought, long-running conflicts that were geographically diffuse, morally ambiguous, and impervious to neat endings or declarations of victory. Ruthless counterinsurgencies in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus rippled through British society, molding a home front defined not by the mass mobilization of resources, but by sentiments…
I’ve been fascinated by information technology since I was a child–whether in the form of books, libraries, computers, or cell phones! Living through a massive expansion in the volume of data, I believe it is essential to study the long history of information to make sense of our current data-driven times–which is why I became a historian of data, which I teach and write about full time. Here are some of the most informative and insightful books that have helped me make sense of our issues, ranging from information overload and artificial intelligence to privacy and data justice.
If you love NPR as much as I do, then this is the book for you! Shepperd tells the fascinating story of how public radio came into being in the US during the mid-twentieth century–and how public radio played a crucial role in defining Americans’ expectations about what they have the right to know about their government’s activities.
If you want to make sense of the historical relationship between democracy and data, then this is the book for you!
Winner of the 2024 BEA Book Award
Runner-up in the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)
Runner-up for the AJHA Book of the Year (American Journalism Historians Association).
Despite uncertain beginnings, public broadcasting emerged as a noncommercial media industry that transformed American culture. Josh Shepperd looks at the people, institutions, and influences behind the media reform movement and clearinghouse the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in the drive to create what became the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio.
Founded in 1934, the NAEB began as a disorganized collection of undersupported…
I am a writer of biographical historical fiction, with some of my novels set in medieval and Tudor England, others set in nineteenth-century America. In researching my books, I try to immerse myself in my characters’ world, and that means reading primary sources, such as newspapers, periodicals, letters, diaries, and memoirs. I especially like to read my characters’ own words. Fortunately, the nineteenth-century feminists featured in this list left a lot of words behind them!
What list of nineteenth-century feminists would be complete without the movement’s grand dames, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton? This book, the first of a six-volume series, takes us to the early days of their friendship and alliance. Not only is this collection a testimony to the enormous amount of energy and organization expended by these two reformers, but it also reminds us of their human side.
Some of my favorite moments include Stanton bragging about the birth of her first daughter (and fifth child): “I laid on a lounge about 15 minutes, and alone with my nurse & one female friend, brought forth this noble girl,” and Anthony grumbling about her decision to give up the “Bloomer” outfit adopted by a number of women reformers, “I have let down some of my dresses and am dragging around with long skirts.”
In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840-1866 is the first of six volumes of The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The collection documents the lives and accomplishments of two of America's most important social and political reformers. Though neither Stanton nor Anthony lived to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, each of them devoted fifty-five years to the cause. Their names were synonymous with woman suffrage in the United States and around the world as they mobilized thousands of women to fight for the right to a political voice.
Amidst COVID-19, HIV/AIDS is a touchpoint for journalists, scholars, writers, and a public who seek a usable past in understanding the present and making an uncertain future less so. The challenge of how to love, live, and survive amidst pandemics isn't new, I play here on the title of one of the first safer sex books,How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. As someone who studies how activists document their work and how they bring those materials to life today, I'm both fascinated and troubled by pandemic comparisons. These books offer crucial stories and productive tools to think with as we navigate questions of how to survive, and maybe even thrive amidst intersecting pandemics.
Marty Fink’s book is one of the best examples of recent and groundbreaking scholarship on HIV/AIDS.
Fink examines HIV/AIDS histories through critical disability studies discourse to show in a compelling and very readable way how queer and trans people in the 1980s and early 1990s came together to take care of each other when faced with stark and far-reaching state violence.
This book has deep contemporary relevance showing how multifaceted HIV care-giving narratives continue to inform how individuals and our wider society makes sense of gender, disability, and kinship.
Such work is essential in this political moment where we are seeing ever-more challenges to bodily self-determination, for women, queer and, especially for trans people.
Finalist for the LGBTQ Nonfiction Award from Lambda Literary
Queers and trans people in the 1980s and early ‘90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together take care of each other in the face of state violence. In revisiting these histories alongside ongoing queer and trans movements, this book uncovers how early HIV care-giving narratives actually shape how we continue to understand our genders and our disabilities. The queer and trans care-giving kinships that formed in response to HIV continue to inspire how we have sex and build chosen…
I'm an American historian and former director of UNC-Chapel Hill's Program in Sexuality Studies—and former pizza maker, gas pumper, park ranger, and tour guide at the house in which Louisa May Alcott wroteLittle Women. As a historian, I've spent my career trying to understand the lives of people in early American history who weren't well known at the time. In writing the Sewing Girl's Tale, which focuses on a survivor of a sexual assault, it was especially important to keep her at the center of the story. Ultimately, I wanted to know: What was life in the aftermath of the American Revolution like—not for some Founding Father—but for an ordinary young woman.
This book brings the format of a graphic novel to the subject of women's resistance during enslavement and the trans-Altantic slave trade—and the result is fresh and compelling. As a historian myself, I appreciated the interwtined narratives of Hall's own research quest as a historian following the documentary record—and her reconstruction of the extraordinary revolt of the women held captive in 1772 on the slave-ship Unity. Both the search for truth and the dramatic uprising are conveyed with great skill and emotional power. The account of the Unity revolt calls attention to what we know, how we know it, and what we don't know. But Hall refuses to stop there. Instead, carefully marking speculation as such, Hall offers a fascinating, well-informed, effort to imagine a fuller account of what might have actually happened. We are left with a powerful sense of why this history matters two and a half…
'A must-read graphic history. . . an inspired and inspiring defence of heroic women whose struggles could be fuel for a more just future' Guardian
'Not only a riveting tale of Black women's leadership of slave revolts but an equally dramatic story of the engaged scholarship that enabled its discovery' Angela Y. Davis
Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the passage across the Atlantic. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history.
In Wake Rebecca Hall, a historian, a granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy…
I have longed to move to the Shire ever since I first saw the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring. I wasn’t aware at first of Tolkien’s deep Catholic faith, but once it was pointed out to me, I was amazed at how he managed to weave Christian virtue into everything he wrote. As a long-time writer myself, I realized that I wanted to tell stories about the big stuff—love and hope, good and evil, doubt and courage—in a way that was genuine and unflinching. I think that all of the authors on this list have pulled off just that.
Part of what I love the most about The Lord of the Rings is the way that J.R.R. Tolkien made Middle Earth feel like it could be real. I have to remind myself it’s not history, but fiction. Reading Recorder gives me the same feeling. Sure, technically, it’s science fiction. It’s set in space. But there is a depth and honesty to the world that Cathy McCrumb has created that is rare and worth exploring. It is both a prescient warning about the future of humanity and a powerful story about found family and finding hope when up against impossible odds. Also, the romantic subplot of this book will absolutely shatter you.
The Consortium is All. But Recorder Can No Longer Obey.
Recorder has no family, no friends, and no name. Donated to the Consortium before birth, her sole purpose is to maintain and verify the records. A neural implant and drone ensure compliance, punishing for displays of bias.
Suddenly cut off from controlling technology, Recorder tastes what it means to be human. But if the Consortium discovers her feelings, everyone she knows will be in danger.
With no name, no resources, and only an infinitesimal possibility of escape, Recorder's time is running out.
"McCrumb achieves a fascinating coming-of-age story in a…
I teach history at The Ohio State University. This project began when I listened in 1976 to a radio broadcast in which Jack Eddy, a solar physicist, speculated that a notable absence of sunspots in the period 1645-1715 contributed to the “Little Ice Age”: the longest and most severe episode of global cooling recorded in the last 12,000 years. The Little Ice Age coincided with a wave of wars and revolution around the Northern Hemisphere, from the overthrow of the Ming dynasty in China to the beheading of Charles I in England. I spent the next 35 years exploring how the connections between natural and human events created a fatal synergy that produced human mortality on a scale seldom seen before – and never since.
Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland experienced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. None of that will surprise historians of Britain, but they may not realize the impact of these events on Britain’s new colonies across the Atlantic. Some of them remained loyal to the king until his victorious opponents sent the first major Transatlantic expeditionary force to subdue them.
Pestana shows how war and rebellion in Britain increased both the proportion of unfree labourers and ethnic diversity in the colonies. Neglected by London, several of them developed trade networks; some entered the slave trade. By 1660, the English Atlantic had become religiously polarized, economically interconnected, socially exploitative, and ideologically unstable.
Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland faced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. Carla Gardina Pestana offers a sweeping history that systematically connects these cataclysmic events and the development of the infant plantations from Newfoundland to Surinam.
By 1660, the English Atlantic emerged as religiously polarized, economically interconnected, socially exploitative, and ideologically anxious about its liberties. War increased both the proportion of unfree laborers and ethnic diversity in the settlements. Neglected by London, the colonies quickly developed trade networks, especially from seafaring New England, and entered the slave trade. Barbadian planters…
Having grown up on the south coast of Hampshire, I love both the countryside and the sea. After studying ancient history, archaeology, and Latin at the University of Bristol, I worked for many years as a field archaeologist and met my husband Roy on an excavation of a Roman villa at Milton Keynes. We have worked together ever since, as archaeologists and as authors of books on archaeology, ancient history, naval history, and social history. Our wide-ranging interests proved invaluable when writing our book When There Were Birds.
This is a glorious bird-by-bird book, filled with photographs and lots of information and first-hand accounts, including folklore and history, with copious endnotes and references. It was first published in 2005 and reissued in 2020. The book is divided into different bird families, starting with the Diver family, the Grebe family, and the Albatross family, so it can be read systematically or by dipping in and out. Birds Britannica perhaps deserves the name ‘coffee-table book’ – being so heavy, it is almost impossible to read unless seated (with a coffee) at a table.
The British love their birds, which are inextricably entwined with every aspect of their island life. British customs, more than 1,000 years of English literature, the very fabric of society, even the landscape itself, have all been enhanced by the presence of birds. Highly acclaimed on first publication, this superb book pays tribute to the remarkable relationship forged between a nation and its most treasured national heritage.
Birds Britannica is a unique publication of immense importance. Neither an identification guide nor a behavioural study (although both these subjects enter its field), it concentrates on our social history and on the…
