Books like The Histories

01

History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides · History

Thucydides' account of the twenty-seven-year conflict between Athens and Sparta stands as the founding document of political realism and the first work of history that treats evidence and causation as problems to be solved rather than stories to be told.

Shares war and empire with The Histories.

02

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

A kindred history read.

03

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond · Science

Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question posed to him by a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali: why did Europeans end up with so much cargo — wealth, technology, power — while other peoples had comparatively little?

A kindred history read.

04

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · History

All Quiet on the Western Front follows Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier who enlists with his classmates during the First World War after being swept up in patriotic speeches.

Both dig into war.

05

Annals of Imperial Rome

Tacitus · History

Tacitus wrote the Annals in the early second century CE as a history of Rome from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero — the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, covering roughly 14 to 68 CE.

Both dig into empire.

06

Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission

Hampton Sides · History

Ghost Soldiers tells the story of the January 1945 raid on the Cabanatuan prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines — a mission to rescue 513 American and Allied prisoners, survivors of the Bataan Death March, before the retreating Japanese army could execute them.

Both dig into war.

07

The Forever War

Dexter Filkins · History

Dexter Filkins spent more than a decade covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times, and The Forever War is his attempt to render what he witnessed in a form that is closer to literature than journalism.

Both dig into war.

08

The Prize

Daniel Yergin · History

The Prize is Daniel Yergin's comprehensive history of the oil industry from its origins in Pennsylvania in 1859 through the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991.

Both dig into war.

09

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Peter Frankopan · History

Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads proposes a radical recentering of world history.

Both dig into empire.

10

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah · Memoir

Ishmael Beah was twelve years old when the Sierra Leone civil war reached his village and he was separated from his family.

Both dig into war.

11

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell · Memoir

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which he joined in late 1936 as a volunteer with the POUM militia — a Trotskyist revolutionary organization that was later suppressed by the Soviet-backed Stalinist wing of the Republican forces.

Both dig into war.

12

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · Memoir

Anne Frank's diary, kept during the two years she spent hiding with her family in a concealed Amsterdam apartment, stands as one of the most widely read first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

Both dig into war.