Best History Books for the Biggest Historical Eras

Learn about China’s ancient history through artist and designer Jing Liu’s graphic novel covering China’s early history, spanning five thousand years up to 220 CE. Liu explores the origins of Confucianism and Daoism, the Silk Road, and the following dynasties: the Shang Dynasty, the Zhou dynasty, the Qin Dynasty, and the Han Dynasty. This is a wonderfully visual way to depict Chinese history and culture and how it changed over vast swaths of ancient history.

The history of ancient Greece is largely told to us through the perspective of men, since women were not allowed to play many roles in public society. Susan Blundell, a professor at the University of London who specializes in Greek and Roman philosophy, uses any and all depictions of women in ancient Greece (from art to legal documents to medical writings to poetry) to form a picture of what women’s lives were like.

Mary Beard, a scholar on Ancient Rome, tucked a thousand years of the Roman Empire’s reign into this thorough look at how the empire rose to power and the social aspects of Roman culture. She pays close attention to the lives of ordinary citizens, giving us an in-depth snapshot into how they lived, how they earned money, and the laws and institutions that dictated their social lives. This, juxtaposed with the politics of the major players in the Roman Empire, provides a more complete picture of life during Ancient Rome.

Although this nonfiction history novel spans multiple eras, it begins with the birth of Muhammed and the founding of Islam. Tamim Ansary details the evolution and the history of the Muslim community and how Muslim civilizations and Western civilizations intersected with each other. Ansary walks us through the history of the Empire of the Umayyads, the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Moghuls, and other rich aspects of Islamic history and culture.

This wouldn’t be a complete list if we didn’t talk about the largest empire in history. The Mongolian Empire was five times larger than the Roman Empire, and it began under the leadership of Genghis Khan. Weatherford, a cultural anthropologist and professor, chronicles the lands Khan conquered and how communication, trade, and culture changed as a result.

Cheikh Anta Diop, a historian and anthropologist, focuses on the rich cultural and political history of African civilization before it was colonized, and demonstrates how those societies contributed to Western civilization. Diop’s pages cover the empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Great Zimbabwe, and the kingdoms of Ashanti and Ga. We look at how these empires and kingdoms governed themselves, and how economic systems moved and thrived along the Trans-Saharan trade route and in the market towns of Timbuktu, Kano, Salaga, Mombasa, and Sofala.

The House of Plantagenet ruled England from 1154 to 1485, and created England as we know it today through eight generations of kings. Historian and journalist Dan Jones tackles their reigns, their contributions, their wins, and their failures as England grew and changed. Major European and world events involving or directly influenced by them are covered here, including the Crusades, the creation of the Magna Carta, the Hundred Years War, the wars with Scotland, and the house’s contention with the Catholic Church.

Historian Camilla Townsend wanted to document the history of the Aztecs and what happened to them during the European invasion, but not through what was written about them by the Spaniards at the time. Through their own words. Townsend collected and translated primary sources written by Aztecs who had learned the Roman alphabet or wrote detailed histories in Náhuatl. This book is the English-translated collection of those historical annals, providing a snapshot of Aztec life up to fifty years before the Spanish conquest and after.

Welcome to the Italian Renaissance, which single-handedly transformed European society through scientific innovation, artistic expression, philosophical teachings, and the birth of printmaking and gunpowder. Yet for all history focuses on the art and achievements of the era, much went on behind scenes. Early modern era and Renaissance historian Catherine Fletcher is more interested in the wars that waged on in the background between Spain and France, Catholics and Protestants, Christians and Muslims. The art and the conflict coexisted, after all.

The Tudor period in England and Wales stretched from 1485 to 1603, and concluded with Elizabeth I’s death. Most depictions of the Tudor era are overwhelmingly white, with the assumption that people of color just didn’t exist in Tudor England. Historian Onyeka Nubia is here to remind you that this is blatantly false, and reveals the breadth and depth of cultural exchange at the time, interaction between Tudors and people of African descent, and how race was viewed during that era.

1619 to 2019. Historians Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain assembled ninety writers to tell five years of Black American history each, beginning with the twenty Ndongo enslaved people brought to Jamestown. Four hundred years later, these journalists and poets and activists and anthropologists and more gathered together to tell four hundred years of Black American history from various perspectives and experiences.

For a comprehensive look at the major world events of the 20th century, look no further. Historian Martin Gilbert goes year by year and chronicles the technological and scientific advancements as they occurred, every major war and conflict around the world, our journeys into space, and the ever evolving and influential aspect of the arts, literature, religion, and music.

Historian Barbara Tuchman won a Pulitzer prize for her account of the first thirty days of the First World War. This book is lauded as one of the places to begin when learning about WWI. Tuchman paints a portrait of each European nation’s economical, political, and cultural relations to one another before the war began, and details its beginning with painstaking care to help us understand how we got to the point where 37 million soldiers and civilians died.

Spiegelman also won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel depicting the Holocaust during WWII, and for good reason. Spiegelman drew on his parents’ experiences in Poland during the war, from their relocation to a ghetto to their imprisonment in Auschwitz to their liberation. This is a creative and memorable way to preserve and teach the horrors of the Holocaust during the deadliest war in all of human history.