2020: A Historian’s Reading List

It is time for my annual report on what I read last year. First, past lists:

2019; 2018; 2017; 2016.

Let me use the same language explaining this as last year:

I read these books for my own purposes–to prepare for teaching, to keep up or catch up on the historiography in my fields, occasionally to broaden my horizons. So I do not read every word of these books, nor do I generally read for factual information. I read for preparation for my work, whether my own professional writing, to inform my blog posts, to prepare for new courses, or to think through harder questions. That often means simply being aware of the basic outlines of a book so that I can go into more detail later when I need to write about a given subject. I also included the few books on contemporary politics I read this year, since there’s not much sense separating those out from historical books given my writing. Some of these are new books, most are from the last decade or so, a few are old classics that I had either never read or haven’t read in the last decade.

There’s a lot of really good books. I have also placed bold faced asterisks after 20 books I think LGM readers would find particularly useful/I think you should buy and read. That’s not necessarily the same as what I think are the 20 best books, although there is obviously a lot of crossover. So if you are looking for a good reading list for 2020, here you go. There are well more than 20 of these that are excellent and I made my selections based on a combination of clear writing, what I think LGM readers should be reading from a political perspective, and the quality of the book. I am more than happy to talk about any of these books in comments. There were a lot more than 20 that were excellent in this year’s list.

1. Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom
2. Andrew Friedman, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia ***
3. Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South
4. Michitake Aso, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History
5. Jake Rosenfeld, What Unions No Longer Do
6. Richard White, The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 ***
7. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam ***
8. Harold Steen, ed. History of Sustained Yield Forestry
9. Peter Kolozi, Conservatives against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization
10. Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the American Way: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement
11. Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World
12. Elizabeth Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
13. Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland***
14. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe***
15. Jacqueline Karnell Corn, Environment and Health in Nineteenth-Century America
16. Lara Vapinek, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary
17. Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
18. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market
19. Norman Caulfield, NAFTA and Labor in North America
20. Tore Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside
21. David W. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory
22. Walter Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America
23. S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence
24. Jeffrey Helgeson, Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington
25. Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement
26. Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty
27. Annelise Orleck, “We Are All Fast Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages***
28. Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies
29. Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War
30. Elizabeth Faue, Rethinking the American Labor Movement
31. Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
32. Manning Marable, Malcolm X ***
33. Carmel Finley, All the Boats on the Ocean: How Government Subsidies Led to Global Overfishing
34. Henry Heller, The Capitalist University: The Transformation of Higher Education in the United States since 1945
35. Thomas Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era
36. Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism
37. David Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America
38. Walter Nugent, Color Coded: Party Politics in the American West, 1950-2016
39. Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen, eds., Cities at War: Global Insecurity and Urban Resistance
40. Jason Colby, Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator
41. Jennifer Holland, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement
42. Melanie Kiechle, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America
43. Connie Chiang, Nature behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration
44. Sandra L. Albrecht, The Assault on Labor: The 1986 TWA Strike and the Decline of Workers’ Rights in America
45. Jarrod Roll, Poor Man’s Fortune White Working Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850-1950
46. Andrew Herod, Labor
47. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment ***
48. Adam Morris, American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation
49. Chad Montrie, The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism
50. Nicholas Ashford, Crisis in the Workplace: Occupational Disease and Injury
51. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City ***
52. George Colpitts, Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780-1882
53. Robert Ovetz, When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921
54. Erin Stewart Mauldin, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South
55. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals ***
56. David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom ***
57. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness ***
58. Edward J. Balleisen, Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff
59. Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story
60. Peter Kopp, Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley
61. Dawson Barrett, The Defiant: Protest Movements in Post-Liberal America
62. Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War
63. Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast
64. David Dayen, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power ***
65. Gena Caponi-Tabery, Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, & Black Culture in 1930s America
66. Colleen McDannel, Sister Saints: Mormon Women since the End of Polygamy
67. Jennifer Gaddis, The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools
68. Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, American Capitalism: New Histories
69. Richard Kreitner, Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union
70. Richard Lachmann, First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers
71. Katrine Barber, In Defense of Wyam: Native-White Alliances and the Struggle for Celilo Falls
72. Kent Blansett, A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement ***
73. Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
74. Andrew Masich, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861-1867
75. Gregory Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War
76. Philip Rubio, Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service
77. Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence
78. Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, Moonbound: Apollo 11 and the Dream of Spaceflight
79. Christian Wright, Carbon County USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West
80. Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory
81. Michael McCann and George Lovell, Union by Law: Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism
82. Adam Sowards, An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest
83. Michael Hiltzik, Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America ***
84. A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City ***
85. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History ***
86. Caroline Frederickson, The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections
87. Patrick W. Steele, Home of the Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee
88. Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States
89. Martha Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900
90. Peter LaChapelle, I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music
91. Edward O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age
92. Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America
93. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Anti-Racist
94. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business
95. Cathleen Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement ***
96. Hasia Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way
97. Betsy Wood, Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism
98. Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century
99. John Hoenig, Garden Variety: The American Tomato from Corporate to Heirloom
100. Katherine Turner, How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working Class Meals at the Turn of the Century
101. Mike Konczal, Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand ***
102. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam
103. Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America
104. Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered
105. Greta LeFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America
106. Brodwyn Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro
107. Kelly Lytle Hernandez, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 ***

Because I read a lot of highly regarded political books this year, including some old ones that I hadn’t read before, that was a hard list! I’d easily recommend at least half of these books to you.

Last year, I also started including my fiction/literary non-fiction reading. So let’s do that again too.

New to Me:

1. Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand
2. Ha Jin, Waiting
3. Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock
4. Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
5. Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River
6. Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North
7. Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace
8. George Pelecanos, The Man Who Came Uptown
9. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
10. Elmore Leonard, City Primeval
11. Herta Müller, Nadirs
12. Stephen Foehr, Waking Up in Nashville
13. Caryl Phillips, Cambridge
14. C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold
15. Richard Smith, Can’t You Hear Me Callin’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass
16. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Child of All Nations
17. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
18. Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
19. John T. Edge, The Potlikker Papers
20. Walter Kemposki, Marrow and Bone
21. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture
22. Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
23. Graciliano Ramos, São Bernardo
24. Henry James, The American Scene
25. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
26. John Williams, Stoner
27. Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife
28. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station
29. Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band
30. Arturo Fontaine, La Vida Doble
31. Cyprian Ekwensi, People of the City
32. Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music
33. Jean-Patrick Manchette, No Room at the Morgue
34. Carlton Stowers, Where Dreams Die Hard: A Small American Town and Its Six-Man Football Team
35. William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer
36. Glenn Kenny, Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas
37. Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
38. Kelli Jo Ford, Crooked Hallelujah
39. Elmore Leonard, LaBrava
40. Henri Barbusse, Under Fire
41. Don Yaeger, Turning the Tide: How One Game Changed the South
42. Shahriar Mandanipour, Moonbrow

Re-Read

1. Philip Roth, The Counterlife
2. Jim Bouton, Ball Four
3. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
4. Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment
5. John Dos Passos, The 42^nd Parallel
6. Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain
7. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
8. Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise
9. John Dos Passos, 1919
10. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
11. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
12. Jose Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
13. Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
14. Guillermo Martinez, The Book of Murder
15. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
16. Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life
17. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
18. Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
19. N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
20. Wright Morris, Plains Song
21. Javier Marias, When I Was Mortal
22. Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper
23. John McPhee, In Suspect Terrain
24. John Steinbeck, The Long Valley
25. Robert Bolaño, Amulet
26. Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Happy to talk about all this too. But I can recommend one book, it’s C Pam Zhang’s. What an astounding rethinking of mythology, the West, violence, historical memory, and other critical issues of the West and the nation. Amazing book.