Summer Reads
Looking for some good summer history reads? Welcome to part 1 of our summer history reading list. Enjoy!
David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans
This three-thousand year history tells the story of humanity’s relationship with the awesome powers of our planet’s oceans. The history takes its reader across the globe, showing the ways in which people across the continents and the centuries have engaged with some of Earth’s most perilous and also profitable means of transportation, sustenance, and trade. The book offers a timely reminder of how crucial the oceans are to all life on the planet, including our own.
Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World
This book travels across centuries and the continents to show the power of the written word. In particular, Colley demonstrates the importance of written constitutions (both ones that remain famous and ones that have long-ago become obscure) for the creation of our current world. Constitutions advanced revolutions, granted rights to many, and also intentionally excluded women and people of color. But as constitution-writing spread, it also became a way for states outside of the west to resist encroaching European and American power.
Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began
The year 1000 represented a moment of great change throughout the world. Across the globe, civilizations and individuals who might have previously stayed home in their villages began traveling—for adventure, exploration, profit, and conquest. At the same time that invaders reached China, the Vikings were reaching the edges of Canada. In this global study, Valerie Hansen traces the changes in shipbuilding, politics, and societies that helped fuel the first major era of globalization.
Judith Herrin, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe
At the end of the 4th century, the Mediterranean world was in upheaval. The long-standing Roman Empire was crumbling in the west and a new Roman Empire—Byzantium—was taking its place in the east. In between, on the eastern coast of Italy, was the city of Ravenna. In this book, Judith Herrin shows how Ravenna stood at the center of the making of medieval eastern and western Europe and effortlessly weaves together the mosaic of life in Ravenna itself, from scholars to craftsmen, from new artists to politicians.
Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake
This deeply-moving book starts from a single object: a bag that had been passed down from Rose, an enslaved woman, to her daughter Ashley, who in turn passed it down to other women in her family. This bag becomes a entryway into a larger question about history itself: how to study the histories of individuals who have been left out of (or intentionally excluded from) historical evidence.
Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
This historical study—a page-turning thriller itself—tells the amazing story of how Virginia Hall, a woman born into a wealthy US family, persevered against prejudice to eventually become one of the most successful spies working in the European theater. This book tells how she infiltrated the command of Vichy France, trained civilians, freed prisoners of war, and ultimately became the Gestapo’s most urgent target.
Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife
In 2012, a professor of religion at Harvard claimed to have discovered a fragment of a papyrus scroll in which Jesus Christ called Mary Magdalene his wife. But how did she discover this papyrus fragment? And where did it come from? Journalist Ariel Sabar takes us with her on her dazzling worldwide quest to find the provenance of the papyrus—from the old days of the East German Stasi to contemporary Florida.
Jia Lynn Yang, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965
In 1924, the United States passed a strict quota system for immigration, largely ending large-scale immigration from southern and eastern Europe and banning nearly all immigration from Asia. Jia Lynn Yang’s research tells the story of the presidents, representatives, and activists who worked through the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War to end the system immigration quotas, culminating in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
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