I don’t read nearly enough history books in my spare time. That said, here are some recommendations!
non-fiction (or “real” history)
A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire - Emma Southon (416pp.)
What’s your Roman Empire? One of mine is using archaeology to find women’s stories in the past. Southon is a classicist who does just that (see also her biography of Agrippina the Younger). This book retraces the broad strokes of Roman history through the women that shaped them. (Caution: her style makes heavy use of contemporary pop culture references so if that’s not your vibe, you probably won’t love this.)
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - David Graeber and David Wengrow (704pp.)
You want a detailed, well-researched book that retraces all of human history? Sorry. I don’t think such a project is possible. You can read this one, though, if you want to understand how our world came to be. The Davids (composed of a sociologist and anthropologist) argue that much of how we understand human history is coloured by the dominant political forces of the 20th and 21st centuries - namely capitalism, hierarchy, domination, and white supremacy. What would history look like through a different lens? This magnum opus leans on archaeological inquiry and a new reading of historical texts to argue (convincingly, in my view) that humanity is essentially curious, adaptable, experimental, and even kind.
“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp.5)
Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists - Margaret Bruchac (280pp.)
This one has a special place in my heart. Bruchac is a singular thinker and author in that all of her work both challenges your mind and tugs at your heart. (Like this 2016 poem.) This book looks at some of the Indigenous people who helped conduct (and in many cases, produced) the work of American anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s a quick read with a revelation on every page.
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route - Saidiya Hartman (288pp.)
The smartest people I know have not stopped talking about this one. Hartman is both a historian and an English professor whose trademark style is critical fabulation: the blending of historical writing with personal or fictional narrative. The result of this is a personal, even autoethnographic connection between past and present. This book tells a story of the Atlantic slave trade and its lingering effects through a blend of historical archives and Hartman’s own physical retracing of a trade route, from west Africa to the Atlantic coast. I am very eager to start this one.
Lady Sapiens: Enquête sur la femme au temps de la préhistoire - Thomas Cirotteau, Jennifer Kerner, et Éric Pincas (256pp.)
Ça serait pas un spoiler si je vous dis que l'étude des peuples préhistoriques a été influencée par les perspectives patriarcales du monde contemporain. ICYM: ces dernières années, nous avons vu des reportages innumérables sur les femmes chasseurs-cueilleurs à travers le monde. Lady Sapiens est à la fois une excellente introduction aux modes de vie préhistoriques dans l'Europe du passé lointain (principalement en France) et une étude de cas sur comment les femmes ont été interprétées par les paléoanthropologues (largement masculins). (Spoiler: Ils sont obsédés par nous, mais n'ont jamais compris que nous sommes aussi des êtres humains.)
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art - Rebecca Wragg Sykes (400pp.)
Tearjerker! (For me, anyway.) Turns out, our Neanderthal cousins also experienced every emotion that you and I ever have. They made art and mourned their dead and believed in big ideas and loved each other and fought each other and did they best with what they had, which is all anyone can do anyway, whether in 2023 CE or 600,000 BCE. Sykes lulls us into the deep past with the beautiful prose marking the beginning of each chapter and keeps us there with her extensive archaeological research. A revolutionary work.
fiction (or “thinking like an archaeologist”)
Adherent - Chris W. Kim (220pp.)
Graphic novel #1! I’ll rip this right from my 2023 summer reads post: How do you paint a picture of those who came before you based only on the things they’ve left behind? Adherent imagines a kind of postapocalyptic archaeology and prompts us to think about how our own ancestors will make sense of our strange, hyperconsumerist society.
Here - Richard McGuire (300pp.)
Graphic novel #2! Want a quick yet meaningful read? This one promises speed: there are no words in it. Rather, McGuire picks a spot in a house and shows us everything that has ever happened on that spot, from the age of dinosaurs to the distant future. Every place holds the memory of a trillion litle events. I think it’s a fascinating exercise to imagine some of them.
Excavations - Kate Myers (224pp.)
A novel! A gang of young female archaeologists - undergrads, PhDs, unemployed drifters - spends a wild summer in Greece excavating, exploring, and causing problems for everyone involved. There’s a couple little Easter eggs throughout for anyone who’s suffered through an archaeological theory course, but this book really is for everyone. Fun fact: Myers is actually an archaeologist who then worked for CollegeHumor (remember CollegeHumor?) and later became an author. Dream job pipeline.
Slay