100 Excellent History Books Written by Women


History books written by women


The 100 Excellent History Books Written by Women list has been created to help promote history authored by women here at listmuse. We aim to include a substantial number of history books written by women in our history book lists but we felt it was worth having a seperate list entirely devoted to excellent history books written by female historians. For those searching for something to read on Women's History Month there are plenty of women's history books to read on the list, as well as all other genres of history. For more information on history books written by women, check out Women Also Know History.

1. Born for Liberty

By Sara M. Evans | Under $1.00

The most concise and comprehensive one-volume history of American women--from the indigenous women of the 16th-century wilderness to the dual-role career women and mothers of contemporary times--this book brings American womanhood to center stage, exploring the lives of pioneers and slaves, immigrants and factory workers, executives and homemakers. ... More »

Born for Liberty
Gender and the Politics of History

2. Gender and the Politics of History

By Joan Scott | Used Price: 90% Off

Gender and the Politics of History marks a watershed in feminist history and gender equality. Joan Scott is a celebrated feminist historian and a professor at Princeton University. More »

3. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

By Drew Gilpin Faust

More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of ... More »

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It

4. Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It

By Sheila Rowbotham | Under $1.00

Hidden From History is a study of women in Britain from the 1600s to the 1930s. It demonstrates how class, gender, work, family life, personal life and social pressures have interacted in women's endeavours for equality. More »

5. Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh

By Joyce A. Tyldesley | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Egypt?s Queen?or, as she would prefer to be remembered, King?Hatchepsut ruled over an age of peace, prosperity, and remarkable architectural achievement (c. 1490 b.c.). Had she been born a man, her reign would almost certainly have been remembered for its stable government, successful trade missions, and the construction ... More »

Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

6. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

By Lillian Faderman | Used Price: 50% Off

This is Lillian Faderman's classic history of lesbianism in 20th century America. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers was named one of the top ten radical history books in The Guardian by Sheila Rowbothan in 2016 and it was a New York Times Notable Book of 1992. More »

7. The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

By Susan Mann

Susan Mann illuminates a history of China that's largely been hidden. By exploring the memoirs of three generations of educated women from one Chinese family, Mann transforms our understanding of everyday life for women during the late imperial period. More »

The Talented Women of the Zhang Family
The Guns of August

8. The Guns of August

By Barbara Tuchman | Used Price: 70% Off

The Pulitzer Prize winning, The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, is focussed on the first month of World War I. Tuchman explains in detail the events that led to the war. The book was featured in the Modern Library's Top 100 nonfiction books of the 20th Century. More »

9. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 - 1350

By Janet L. Abu-Lughod | Used Price: 80% Off

Abu-Lughod examines global economic evolution examining a system that existed before the European world system that was very different from it. More »

Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 - 1350
Aztecs: An Interpretation

10. Aztecs: An Interpretation

By Inga Clendinnen

Inga Clendinnen explores the everyday lives of Aztec warriors, priests and women in their most important city, Tenochtitlan. She delivers a picture of a sophisticated, rich culture, one with savage ritual sacrifice. More »

11. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City

By Martha Biondi

The story of the civil rights movement typically begins with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and culminates with the 1965 voting rights struggle in Selma. But as Martha Biondi shows, a grassroots struggle for racial equality in the urban North began a full ten years before the ... More »

To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City
Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity

12. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity

By Sarah Pomeroy | Used Price: 70% Off

"The first general treatment of women in the ancient world to reflect the critical insights of modern feminism. Though much debated, its position as the basic textbook on women's history in Greece and Rome has hardly been challenged."--Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement. Illustrations. More »

13. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

By Mary Beard

Covering nearly 1,000 years of Roman history, Mary Beard brings the subject to life. SPQR is a broad modern history covering subjects neglected for centuries and with a detailed understanding of the democratic struggles of Rome. More »

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya

14. Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya

By Caroline Elkins | Used Price: 90% Off

Britain's Gulag examines the British response to the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya post-World War Two. Elkins examines the brutal tactics adopted by the British to maintain their empire – including putting 1.5 million people into concentration camps. More »

15. Europe since 1945

By Mary Fulbrook

Mary Fulbrook's Introduction to this splendid concluding volume in The Short Oxford History of Europe begins with a vivid contrast, setting the struggle for survival in a devastated rubble-strewn street of East Berlin in 1945 against the same location in the reunited city at the end of the ... More »

Europe since 1945
The Return of Martin Guerre

16. The Return of Martin Guerre

By Natalie Zemon Davis | Used Price: 90% Off

The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer's day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin ... More »

17. Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen

By Linda M. Heywood

"The fascinating story of arguably the greatest queen in sub-Saharan African history, who surely deserves a place in the pantheon of revolutionary world leaders." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Though largely unknown in the West, the seventeenth-century African queen Njinga was one of the most multifaceted rulers in ... More »

Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen
A History of the Cuban Revolution

18. A History of the Cuban Revolution

By Aviva Chomsky | Used Price: 60% Off

A History of the Cuban Revolution presents a concise socio-historical account of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, an event that continues to spark debate 50 years later. Balances a comprehensive overview of the political and economic events of the revolution with a look at the revolution's social ... More »

19. The Making of Haiti: Saint Domingue Revolution From Below

By Carolyn E. Fick | Used Price: 70% Off

In 1789 the French colony of Saint Domingue was the wealthiest and most flourishing of the Caribbean slave colonies, its economy based on the forced labor of more than half a million black slaves raided from their African homelands.  The revolt of this underclass in 1791-the only successful ... More »

The Making of Haiti: Saint Domingue Revolution From Below
The Story of Egypt

20. The Story of Egypt

By Joann Fletcher

The story of the world's greatest civilization spans 4,000 years of history that have shaped the world. It is full of spectacular cities and epic stories-an evolving society rich in inventors, heroes, heroines, villains, artisans, and pioneers. Professor Joann Fletcher pulls together the complete story of Egypt, charting ... More »

21. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867

By Catherine Hall

How did the English get to be English? In Civilising Subjects, Catherine Hall argues that the idea of empire was at the heart of mid-nineteenth-century British self-imagining, with peoples such as the "Aborigines" in Australia and the "negroes" in Jamaica serving as markers of difference separating "civilised" English ... More »

Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867
The Russian Revolution

22. The Russian Revolution

By Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick practically created the field of social studies in Soviet history. Her pioneering works include the classic text The Russian Revolution, a succinct, must read work for anyone studying Russian history. The book explores the roots of the revolution that was meant to transform the world ... More »

23. Byzantine Matters

By Averil Cameron

Why is Byzantium often ignored and passed over? What was the nature of the Byzantine empire and how is it relevant to today? These are just some of the questions posed by renowned scholar Averil Cameron in Byzantine Matters. More »

Byzantine Matters
Republicanism: An Introduction

24. Republicanism: An Introduction

By Rachel Hammersley

Republicanism is a centuries-old political tradition, yet its precise meaning has long been contested. The term has been used to refer to government in the public interest, to regimes administered by a collective body or an elected president, and even just to systems embodying the values of liberty ... More »

25. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History

By Jill Lepore

Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution--so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty--so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's ... More »

The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History
Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement

26. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement

By Tomiko Brown-Nagin

In this Bancroft Prize-winning history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta from the end of World War II to 1980, Tomiko Brown-Nagin shows that long before "black power" emerged and gave black dissent from the mainstream civil rights agenda a name, African Americans in Atlanta questioned the ... More »

27. Vietnam Wars 1945-1990

By Marilyn Young | Used Price: 90% Off

The first book to give equal weight to the Vietnamese and American sides of the Vietnam war. More »

Vietnam Wars 1945-1990
How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs

28. How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs

By Elizabeth F. Thompson

The story of a pivotal moment in modern world history, when Arabs established a representative democracy-and how the West crushed it When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against their Turkish rulers and allied with the British on the promise of ... More »

29. Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s

By Lynn Dumenil; Eric Foner

When most of us take a backward glance at the 1920s, we may think of prohibition and the jazz age, of movies stars and flappers, of Harold Lloyd and Mary Pickford, of Lindbergh and Hoover--and of Black Friday, October 29, 1929, when the plunging stock market ushered in ... More »

Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s
The Original Australians: Stories of the Aboriginal People

30. The Original Australians: Stories of the Aboriginal People

By Josephine Flood

The Original Australians tells the story of Australian Aboriginal history and society from its distant beginnings to the present day. From the wisdom and paintings of the Dreamtime, to the first contacts between Europeans and indigenous Australians, right through to modern times, it offers an insight into the ... More »

31. China's Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination

By Ji-young Lee | Used Price: 70% Off

Many have viewed the tribute system as China's tool for projecting its power and influence in East Asia, treating other actors as passive recipients of Chinese domination. China's Hegemony sheds new light on this system and shows that the international order of Asia's past was not as Sinocentric ... More »

China's Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination
The Renaissance

32. The Renaissance

By Alison Brown

Alison Brown, Emeritus Professor of Italian Renaissance History at Royal Holloway, University of London, wrote one of the most useful and popular books on the Renaissance. It covers all aspects of the time incorporating all the latest research. More »

33. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900-1300

By Susan Reynolds | Used Price: 80% Off

This work explores the values and activities of ordinary people in Medieval Western Europe. Rather than focus on hierarchical structures the author instead looks at horizontal bonds of collective association. More »

Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900-1300
Capitalism and a New Social Order

34. Capitalism and a New Social Order

By Joyce Appleby | Used Price: 90% Off

In 1800 the Jeffersonian Republicans, decisive victors over what they considered elitist Federalism, seized the potential for change in the new American nation. They infused in it their vision of a society of economically progressive, politically equal, and socially liberated individuals. This book examines the fusion of ideas ... More »

35. And Still the Waters Run

By Angie Debo | Used Price: 70% Off

Debo's classic work tells the tragic story of the spoliation of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations at the turn of the last century in what is now the state of Oklahoma. After their earlier forced removal from traditional lands in the ... More »

And Still the Waters Run
The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939

36. The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939

By Helen Graham

This new analysis of the forces of the Spanish Leftist movement during the Civil War of 1936-9 makes two crucial propositions. It claims that the wartime responses and limitations of the movement can be understood only in relationship to its pre-war experiences, world views, organizational structures and the ... More »

37. Africa and the Africans in the Nineteenth Century: A Turbulent History

By Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch; Mary Baker

Most histories seek to understand modern Africa as a troubled outcome of nineteenth century European colonialism, but that is only a small part of the story. In this celebrated book, beautifully translated from the French edition, the history of Africa in the nineteenth century unfolds from the perspective ... More »

Africa and the Africans in the Nineteenth Century: A Turbulent History
Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe

38. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe

By Victoria de Grazia

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the ... More »

39. Medieval Women

By Eileen Power | Used Price: 50% Off

Throughout her career as a medieval historian, Eileen Power was engaged on a book on women in the Middle Ages. She did not live to write the book but some of the material she collected found its way into her popular lectures on medieval women. These lectures were ... More »

Medieval Women
Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies

40. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies

By Judith Stein

In this fascinating new history, Judith Stein argues that in order to understand our current economic crisis we need to look back to the 1970s and the end of the age of the factory-the era of postwar liberalism, created by the New Deal, whose practices, high wages, and ... More »

41. A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

By Lizabeth Cohen

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its ... More »

A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980

42. The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980

By Lisa Anderson | Used Price: 60% Off

"At once steeped in detailed contextual knowledge and fully engaged with basic theoretical issues, Lisa Anderson's fine book can serve as an inspiration and a model for all who would push the analysis of state building in relation to social structure well beyond the European settings in which ... More »

43. Nazi Germany

By Jane Caplan

The history of National Socialism as a movement and a regime remains one of the most compelling and intensively studied aspects of twentieth-century history, one whose significance extends far beyond Germany or even Europe. Featuring ten chapters by leading international experts, this volume presents an up-to-date and authoritative ... More »

Nazi Germany
Inventing Human Rights: A History

44. Inventing Human Rights: A History

By Lynn Hunt

"A tour de force." - Gordon S. Wood, New York Times Book Review How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces ... More »

45. Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle, and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture

By Caroline Dodds Pennock

The history of the Aztecs has been haunted by the spectre of human sacrifice. Reinvesting the Aztecs with a humanity frequently denied to them, and exploring their spectacular religious violence as a comprehensible element of life, this book integrates a fresh interpretation of gender with an innovative study ... More »

Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle, and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture
From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages

46. From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages

By Katharine Simms

The Norman invasion of Ireland (1169) did not result in a complete conquest, and those native Irish chieftains who retained independent control of their territories achieved a recovery of power in the later middle ages. Katharine Simms studies the experience of the resurgent chieftains, who were undergoing significant ... More »

47. Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650

By Leslie Page Moch

Moving Europeans tells the story of the vast movements of people throughout Europe and examines the links between human mobility and the fundamental changes that transformed European life. This update of a classic text describes the Western European migration from the pre-industrial era to the year 2000. For ... More »

Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650
The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal

48. The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal

By Afua Cooper

During the night of April 10, 1734, Montreal burned. Marie-Joseph Angelique, a twenty-nine-year-old slave, was arrested, tried, and found guilty of starting the blaze that consumed forty-six buildings. Suspecting that she had not acted alone and angered that she had maintained her innocence, Angelique's condemners tortured her after ... More »

49. Islam: A Short History

By Karen Armstrong | Under $1.00

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular imagination as an extreme faith that promotes terrorism, authoritarian government, female oppression, and civil war. In a vital revision of this narrow view of Islam and a distillation of years of ... More »

Islam: A Short History
The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America

50. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America

By Ruth Rosen

In this enthralling narrative-the first of its kind-historian and journalist Ruth Rosen chronicles the history of the American women's movement from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present. Interweaving the personal with the political, she vividly evokes the events and people who participated in our era's most ... More »

51. A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights

By Elizabeth Borgwardt

In a work of sweeping scope and luminous detail, Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime. Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision ... More »

A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights
Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England

52. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England

By Jeanette M. Neeson

Did enclosure of the commons raise or lower living standards for the poor in England? This ground-breaking history enters that old debate, painting a rich picture of rural culture before enclosure and what was lost afterwards. Said to be the best book on the subject by EP Thompson. More »

53. African Women: Early History to the 21st Century

By Kathleen Sheldon

African women's history is a topic as vast as the continent itself, embracing an array of societies in over fifty countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. In African Women: Early History to the 21st Century, Kathleen Sheldon masterfully delivers a comprehensive study of this ... More »

African Women: Early History to the 21st Century
Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam

54. Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam

By Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of U.S. involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the reader from the marshy ... More »

55. The Enlightenment

By Dorinda Outram

What is the Enlightenment? A period rich with debates on the nature of man, truth and the place of God, with the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. But did the Enlightenment mean the same for men and women, for rich and poor, for Europeans and non-Europeans? ... More »

The Enlightenment
The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789-1918

56. The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789-1918

By Lynn Abrams

Modern woman was made between the French Revolution and the end of the First World War. In this time, the women of Europe crafted new ideas about their sexuaity, motherhood, the home, the politics of femininity, and their working roles. They faced challenges about what a woman should ... More »

57. Imperial Eclipse: Japan's Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945

By Yukiko Koshiro

The "Pacific War" narrative of Japan's defeat that was established after 1945 started with the attack on Pearl Harbor, detailed the U.S. island-hopping campaigns across the Western Pacific, and culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan's capitulation, and its recasting as the western shore of ... More »

Imperial Eclipse: Japan's Strategic Thinking about Continental Asia before August 1945
A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930

58. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930

By Alice Conklin | Used Price: 60% Off

This book addresses a central but often ignored question in the history of modern France and modern colonialism: How did the Third Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values, allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal of a "civilizing" ideology with distinct racist ... More »

59. Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America's Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present

By Susan Kellogg | Used Price: 80% Off

Weaving the Past offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary history of Latin America's indigenous women. While the book concentrates on native women in Mesoamerica and the Andes, it covers indigenous people in other parts of South and Central America, including lowland peoples in and beyond Brazil, and Afro-indigenous peoples, ... More »

Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America's Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present
Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

60. Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

By Marguerite Guzman Bouvard | 90% Off

Revolutionizing Motherhood examines one of the most astonishing human rights movements of recent years. During the Argentine junta's Dirty War against subversives, as tens of thousands were abducted, tortured, and disappeared, a group of women forged the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and changed Argentine politics forever. ... More »

61. The Great Cauldron: A History of Southeastern Europe

By Marie-Janine Calic

A sweeping history of southeastern Europe from antiquity to the present that reveals it to be a vibrant crossroads of trade, ideas, and religions. We often think of the Balkans as a region beset by turmoil and backwardness, but from late antiquity to the present it has ... More »

The Great Cauldron: A History of Southeastern Europe
The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918-1933

62. The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918-1933

By Sally Marks

Sally Marks provides a compelling analysis of European diplomacy between the First World War and Hitler's advent. She explores in clear and lively prose the reasons why successive efforts failed to create a lasting peace in the interwar era. Building on the theories of the first edition - ... More »

63. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories

By Emilia Viotti da Costa

First published in 1985 and now expanded to include a new chapter on women, the book explores the social, political, economic, and intellectual currents that shaped nineteenth-century Brazil and whose reverberations continue to be felt throughout contemporary Brazilian society. More »

The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories
Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity

64. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity

By Afsaneh Najmabadi | Used Price: 50% Off

Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of ... More »

65. When God Took Sides: Religion and Identity in Ireland - Unfinished History

By Marianne Elliott

The struggle between Catholic and Protestant has shaped Irish history since the Reformation, with tragic consequences up to the present day. But how do Catholics and Protestants in Ireland see each other? And how do they view their own communities and what these communities stand for? Tracing ... More »

When God Took Sides: Religion and Identity in Ireland - Unfinished History
Reformation Europe

66. Reformation Europe

By Ulinka Rublack

How could the Protestant Reformation take off from Wittenberg, a tiny town in Saxony, which contemporaries regarded as a mud hole? And how could a man of humble origins, deeply scared by the devil, become a charismatic leader and convince others that the Pope was the living Antichrist? ... More »

67. The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class

By Selina Todd

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'There was nothing extraordinary about my childhood or background. And yet I looked in vain for any aspect of my family's story when I went to university to read history, and continued to search fruitlessly for it throughout the next decade. Eventually I realised ... More »

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class
Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present

68. Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present

By Pat Thane

How has the UK evolved into the country it is today? This clear, comprehensive survey of its history since 1900 explores the political, economic, social and cultural changes which have divided the nation and held it together, and how these changes were experienced by individuals and communities. Pat ... More »

69. Votes For Women: The Struggle for Suffrage

By Jean H. Baker

In Votes For Women, Jean H. Baker has assembled an impressive collection of new scholarship on the struggle of American women for the suffrage. Each of the eleven essays illuminates some aspect of the long battle that lasted from the 1850s to the passage of the suffrage amendment ... More »

Votes For Women: The Struggle for Suffrage
Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia

70. Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia

By Ann Mcgrath

Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia. Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of ... More »

71. Getting Equal: The history of Australian feminism

By Marilyn Lake

What woman today would accept losing her job or her nationality on marriage? What mother would accept that she had no custody rights to her children? Who would deny women the right to equal pay and economic independence? Women today enjoy freedoms unimagined by their mothers and ... More »

Getting Equal: The history of Australian feminism
Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century

72. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century

By Barbara Jeanne Fields

During the tumultuous Civil War era, the border state of Maryland occupied a middle position both geographically and socially. Situated between the slave-labor states of the lower South and the free-labor states of the North, Maryland-with a black population almost evenly divided between slave and free-has long ... More »

73. Indigenous Peoples Within Canada: A Concise History

By Olive Patricia Dickason; William Newbigging

Carefully and conscientiously updated, this fourth edition is a brief but comprehensive overview of the long and vibrant history of Indigenous Peoples within what is now Canada. This engaging, chronological text offers a multifaceted account from time immemorial and pre-contact to present-day movements towards self-determination. More »

Indigenous Peoples Within Canada: A Concise History
The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

74. The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

By Svetlana Alexievich | Used Price: 50% Off

A long-awaited English translation of the groundbreaking oral history of women in World War II across Europe and Russia-from the winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The Guardian • NPR • The Economist • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel • Kirkus ReviewsFor more than three ... More »

75. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

By Ruth Ben-Ghiat

What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped). Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin-enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America. In Strongmen, she lays bare the ... More »

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West

76. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West

By Margaret C. Jacob

As more historians acknowledge the central significance of science and technology in the making of the first Industrial Revolution, the need for a good, general history of the achievements of the Scientific Revolution has grown. Scientific Culture and The Making of the Industrial West explains this historical process ... More »

77. Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History

By Dagmar Herzog

This original book brings a fascinating and accessible new account of the tumultuous history of sexuality in Europe from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Although the twentieth century is often called "the century of sex" and seen as ... More »

Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History
News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945

78. News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945

By Heidi Tworek

To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire-and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a ... More »

79. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate

By Leila Ahmed | Used Price: 70% Off

This book presents an historical overview of women and gender in Islam. It is written from a feminist perspective, using the analytic tools of contemporary gender studies. The results of its investigations cast new light on the issues covered. More »

Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America

80. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America

By Linda Kerber | Used Price: 80% Off

Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, ... More »

81. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War

By Susan L. Woodward

Yugoslavia was well positioned at the end of the cold war to make a successful transition to a market economy and westernization. Yet two years later, the country had ceased to exist, and devastating local wars were being waged to create new states. Between the fall of the ... More »

Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War
May '68 and Its Afterlives

82. May '68 and Its Afterlives

By Kristin Ross | Used Price: 80% Off

During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector ... More »

83. The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo

By Lauren H. Derby | Used Price: 60% Off

The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator's Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of ... More »

The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo
Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War

84. Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War

By Tanya Harmer | Used Price: 90% Off

Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende's democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende's left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against ... More »

85. Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France

By Caroline Ford

Challenging the conventional wisdom that French environmentalism can be dated only to the post-1945 period, Caroline Ford argues that a broadly shared environmental consciousness emerged in France much earlier. Natural Interests unearths the distinctive features of French environmentalism, in which a large and varied cast of social actors ... More »

Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France
The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

86. The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

By Margaret Kelleher

The Maamtrasna Murders provides a cultural history of the events and subsequent impact of the renowned Maamtrasna murders from the perspective of language change in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Professor Kelleher takes the Maamtrasna case - one that is notorious for its failure to provide interpretation and translation services ... More »

87. State Repression and the Labors of Memory

By Elizabeth Jelin | Used Price: 80% Off

Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for "the disappeared" in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Gou More »

State Repression and the Labors of Memory
Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

88. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

By Kirsten Weld

In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960-1996), silence and ... More »

89. Requiem for Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961-1969

By Ruth Leacock

"Let us once again transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts…" urged President John F. Kennedy on March 13, 1961.  "Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggle of people everywhere-not with an imperialism of force or ... More »

Requiem for Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961-1969
American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence

90. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence

By Pauline Maier

Pauline Maier shows us the Declaration as both the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation. It is truly "American Scripture," and Maier tells us how it came to be -- from the Declaration's birth in the hard ... More »

91. Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico

By Camilla Townsend

Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortés in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521. "Malintzin," at least, was what the Indians called her. The Spanish called her doña Marina, and she has become known to posterity as ... More »

Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico
Slave Revolts in Antiquity

92. Slave Revolts in Antiquity

By Theresa Urbainczyk

Although much has been written on Greek and Roman slavery, slave resistance has typically been dismissed as historically insignificant and those revolts that are documented are portrayed as wholly exceptional and resulting from peculiar historical circumstances that had little to do with the intrinsic views or organizational capabilities ... More »

93. After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1874

By Margot C. Finn

This book charts the course of working- and middle-class radical politics in England from the continental revolutions of 1848 to the fall of Gladstone's Liberal government in 1874. The author traces the genealogy of English radicalism from its roots in Protestant Dissent and the seventeenth-century revolutions, but also ... More »

After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1874
Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire

94. Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire

By Anne F Broadbridge

How did women contribute to the rise of the Mongol Empire while Mongol men were conquering Eurasia? This book positions women in their rightful place in the otherwise well-known story of Chinggis Khan (commonly known as Genghis Khan) and his conquests and empire. Examining the best known women ... More »

95. The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

By Romila Thapar

Early India represents a complete rewriting by Romila Thapar of her classic work, A History of India (the first volume in the Penguin History of India series), thirty-five years after it was first published. Thapar has incorporated the vast changes in scholarly understanding and interpretation of Indian history ... More »

The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300
Stacking the coffins: Influenza, war and revolution in Ireland, 1918-19

96. Stacking the coffins: Influenza, war and revolution in Ireland, 1918-19

By Ida Milne

A social history of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic's effects on an Ireland where normal patterns of life were disturbed by war and the growing separatist movement. The influenza seemed to disrupt every aspect of Irish life - culture, economics, politics, medicine and family life. More »

97. The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece

By Jennifer Tolbert Roberts

In 431 BC, the long simmering rivalry between the city-states of Athens and Sparta erupted into open warfare, and for more than a generation the two were locked in a life-and-death struggle. The war embroiled the entire Greek world, provoking years of butchery previously unparalleled in ancient Greece. ... More »

The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece
Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico

98. Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico

By Jocelyn H. Olcott | Used Price: 90% Off

Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico is an empirically rich history of women's political organizing during a critical stage of regime consolidation. Rebutting the image of Mexican women as conservative and antirevolutionary, Jocelyn Olcott shows women activists challenging prevailing beliefs about the masculine foundations of citizenship. Piecing together material ... More »

99. A History of Saudi Arabia

By Madawi al-Rasheed | Used Price: 50% Off

This updated edition analyses the challenges, both internal and external, facing Saudi Arabia in the twenty-first century. Two new chapters discuss the political, economic and social developments in the aftermath of 9/11, painting a vivid picture of a country shocked by terrorism and condemned by the international community. ... More »

A History of Saudi Arabia
The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History

100. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History

By Monica Kim

A groundbreaking look at how the interrogation rooms of the Korean War set the stage for a new kind of battle-not over land but over human subjects Traditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American ... More »