History book reviews: narrative and academic histories spanning ancient civilizations to modern events.
Edda L. Fields-Black’s Combee is the kind of history book that reshapes how you understand a figure you thought you already knew. Harriet Tubman occupies a fixed place in American memory: conductor of the Underground Railroad, liberator of enslaved people, icon of courage. But Fields-Black, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University, pulls back the curtain…
Roy Bainton’s March 1917: On the Brink of Revolution and War, published by Amberley Publishing in 2019, takes as its subject one of the most consequential months in modern history and examines it with the granular attention that its significance demands. In March 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed with a speed that astonished even those…
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team is one of the most illuminating works on Soviet political history in years — a study of the men who surrounded Stalin from the 1920s through his death in 1953, the inner circle that ran the Soviet state and survived, most of them, while millions did not. Fitzpatrick, one of…
Summary Wil Haygood’s I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100 arrives as both a centennial celebration and a serious cultural reckoning. Published in 2018 by Andrews McMeel Publishing, the book surveys the full arc of the Harlem Renaissance, from its earliest stirrings in the 1910s through its peak vitality in the 1920s and…
Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies by Joel Stone is a fascinating and essential history that places the explosive events of July 1967 within the full arc of Detroit’s social, racial, and economic transformation. About the Book The summer of 1967 brought five days of civil unrest to Detroit that left 43 people dead, more than…
The 1916 Irish Rebellion by Hilary Pyle is a stunning visual and narrative account of the Easter Rising that transformed Ireland forever — a meticulously researched and gorgeously produced volume that brings one of the pivotal moments in modern history to vivid, unforgettable life. About the Book Published to coincide with the centenary of the…
William Still kept records when keeping records was dangerous. As a free Black man working in Philadelphia in the 1850s, he maintained meticulous documentation of nearly one thousand freedom seekers who passed through the city on their way north, gathering names, physical descriptions, family histories, and the stories of escape that the individuals entrusted to…
Robin Bernstein’s award-winning history reconstructs the 1846 case of William Freeman, an Afro-Native man whose trial for murder exposed the brutal machinery of America’s original prison for profit system at Auburn State Prison, New York.
Genre editor for History reviews.
In August 1914, Europe went to war in ways its leaders had not planned for, against opponents they had not fully calculated, with consequences none of them foresaw. Barbara Tuchman’s account of the first thirty days of World War I — the mobilizations, the miscalculations, the early battles along the Belgian and French frontiers —…
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