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After 2020 brought the most devastating global pandemic in a century and a national reckoning with systemic racism, 2021 ushered in a number of welcome developments, including Covid vaccines, the return of beloved social traditions like the Olympics and public performances, and incremental but measurable progress in the fight against racial injustice.
During this year of change, these ten titles collectively serve a dual purpose. Some offer a respite from reality, transporting readers to places as varied as Ancient Rome, America’s Golden Age, and Angkor in Cambodia. others reflect on the tense nature of the current moment, detailing how the nation’s past, including the mistreatment of Japanese Americans during World War II and police brutality, informs its present and future. From a chronicle of civilization told through clocks to the quest for indigenous justice in colonial Pennsylvania, these were some of our favorite history books of 2021.
You are reading: Best history books 2021
four lost cities: a secret history of the urban age by annalee newitz
“It is terrifying to realize that most of humanity lives in places destined to die,” Annalee Newitz writes in the opening pages of Four Lost Cities. This stark statement sets the stage for the journalist’s incisive exploration of how cities collapse, a topic with clear ramifications for the “global warming present,” as Kirkus notes in his book review. centered on the ancient metropolis of Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia; Pompeii, the Roman city devastated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79; angkor, the medieval Cambodian capital of the Khmer empire; and Cahokia, a pre-Hispanic metropolis in what is now Illinois, Four Lost Cities traces the successes and failures of its subjects, highlighting surprising connections between these ostensibly disparate societies.
All four cities had sophisticated infrastructure systems and ingenious feats of engineering. Angkor, for example, became an economic powerhouse largely due to its complex network of canals and reservoirs, while Cahokia was known for its towering earthen pyramids, imbued with spiritual significance by the locals. Despite these innovations, prominent urban centers eventually succumbed to what Newitz describes as “protracted periods of political instability,” often precipitated by poor leadership and social hierarchies, “along with environmental collapse.” these same problems plague modern cities, the writer argues, but the past offers valuable lessons for preventing such disasters in the future, including investing in “resilient infrastructure,… public squares, domestic spaces for all, social mobility, and leaders who treat to city workers. with dignity.”
night cover: a history of murder and indigenous justice in early america by nicole eustace
In the winter of 1722, two white fur traders murdered Seneca Hunter Sawantaeny after he rebuffed their drunken and shady attempts to strike a deal. The resulting furor, historian Nicole Eustace writes in Covered with Night, threatened to spark open warfare between the English settlers and the indigenous inhabitants of the Mid-Atlantic. Rather than engage in a bloody and protracted battle, the native peoples of the Susquehanna River Valley forged an agreement, welcoming white traders to their villages once Sawantaeny’s body had been metaphorically “covered” or laid to rest. in a “respectful and ritualized manner”. as eustace told smithsonian magazine’s karin wulf earlier this year.
“the natives believe that a murder crisis creates a rift in the community and that rift must be repaired,” added eustace. “They are not focused on revenge; they are focused on reparation, on the reconstruction of the community. and that requires a variety of actions. they want emotional reconciliation. they want financial restitution.”
The months of negotiation that followed culminated in the 1722 Treaty of Albany, which provided “ritual condolences and reparation payments” for Sawantaeny’s murder, according to Eustace. Little known today, the historian argues, the agreement underscores the differences between native and colonial conceptions of justice. while the former emphasized what would now be considered restorative justice (an approach that seeks to repair the harm caused by a crime), the latter focused on harsh retaliation, imposing swift executions on convicted suspects. “Pennsylvania settlers never really explicitly say, ‘We are following native protocols. we are accepting the precepts of native justice,’” eustace explained to smithsonian. “But they do it because in practical terms they had no choice if they wanted to resolve the situation.”
empire of pain: the secret history of the sacker dynasty by patrick radden keefe
the role of the sadler family in the activation of the us. The opioid epidemic garnered renewed attention this year with the release of “dopesick,” a hulu miniseries based on beth macy’s 2018 book of the same name, and patrick radden keefe’s award-winning empire of pain, which comprehensively examines the rise and the public fall. —of the American drug-trafficking “dynasty.”
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Meticulously researched, the book dates back to the early 2010s, when the journalist was reporting on Mexican drug cartels for the New York Times magazine. As Keefe tells the London Times, he realized that 25 percent of the revenue generated by OxyContin, the most popular pill powered by Sacler-owned Purdue Pharma, came from the black market. Despite this trend, the family was better known for its donations to major art museums than for its role in fostering opiate addiction. “There was a family that had made billions of dollars selling a drug that had such a destructive legacy,” Keefe says, “but they didn’t seem touched by that legacy.” Enraged, he began writing what would become Empire of Pain.
The resulting 560-page exhibit is based on recently released court documents, interviews with more than 200 people, and the author’s personal accounts of looters’ attempts to intimidate him into silence. As the New York Times notes in its review, the book “paint[s] a devastating portrait of a family consumed by greed and unwilling to take the slightest responsibility or show the slightest sympathy for what it brought about.”
until i’m free: fannie lou hamer’s enduring message to the united states by keisha n. white
the historian keisha n. Blain derived the title of her latest book from a well-known quote from her subject, voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer: “We have a long fight and this fight is not mine alone, but you are not free whether you are black or white. until I’m free.” As Blain wrote for the Smithsonian last year, Hamer, who grew up in South Jim Crow in a family of sharecroppers, first learned of her enfranchisement in 1962, at the age of 44. After attempting to register to vote in Mississippi, she faced verbal and physical threats of violence, experiences that only strengthened her resolve.
blain’s book is one of two new hamer biographies published in 2021. the other, walk with me, by historian kate clifford larson, offers a more direct account of the activist’s life. Comparatively, Blain’s volume places Hamer in the broader political context of the civil rights movement. Both titles represent a long-awaited celebration of a woman whose contributions to the fight for equal rights have historically been overshadowed by men like Martin Luther King Jr. and malcolm x.
Into the Woods: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love by Rebecca Frankel
on april 30, 1942, 11-year-old philip lazowski was separated from his family during a nazi selection in the polish town of zhetel. Realizing that the elderly, sick children, and unaccompanied children were being sent one way and families with work permits the other, he tried to mingle with the children of a woman he recognized, only to hear her hiss, ” do not stop”. next to us. you don’t belong to this group. Looking around him, Lazowski soon saw another stranger and his daughters. Desperate, he pleaded with her to let him join them. After a momentary pause, the woman, Miriam Rabinowitz, took his hand and said: “If the Nazis let me live with two children, they will let me live with three.”
all four survived selection. from there, however, their paths temporarily parted. Lazowski was reunited with his family, remaining imprisoned in the Zhetel ghetto before fleeing to the nearby woods, where he remained in hiding for the next two and a half years. Miriam, Ella Morris’s husband, and her two children similarly sought refuge in a forest, but did not meet Lazowski again until after the war. (lazowski later married one of rabinowitz’s daughters, ruth, after meeting miriam at a 1953 brooklyn wedding, a “lucky stroke that…reflects the random twists of fate that allowed the family to survive while many others did not,” by Editors Weekly).
as journalist rebecca frankel writes in the woods, the rabinowitzes and lazowskis were among the estimated 25,000 jews who survived the war by hiding in the woods of eastern europe. Most of these individuals (around 15,000) joined the partisan movement, barely surviving as ragtag bands of resistance fighters, but others, like the Rabinowitzes, formed makeshift family camps, “aimed not at revenge but at survive,” according to the report. Forward. Frankel’s account of the family’s two-year stay in the forest captures the harsh realities of this lesser-known chapter of Holocaust history, detailing how refugees from the forest foraged for food (or stole from locals when supplies were low). scarce), they dug underground shelters and were constantly on the move in the hope of avoiding Nazi incursions. Morris, who worked in the lumber business, used his pre-war connections and knowledge of the forest to help his family survive, avoiding partisans “in the hope of staying out of the fighting” as writes frankel for the new york times. today, she adds, the stories of those who escaped into the woods remain “so elusive” that some scholars have referred to them as “the fringes of the holocaust.”
The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age by Amy Sohn
Although its title might suggest otherwise, The Man Who Hated Women focuses far more on the American women whose rights anthony comstock sought to suppress than on the sexist government official himself. As novelist and columnist Amy Sohn explains in her nonfiction narrative debut, Comstock, a dry goods salesman who worked as a special agent in the US. uu. Post Office and Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, she spent more than four decades harassing activists advocating for women’s reproductive rights. In 1873, he lobbied Congress to pass the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material, including documents related to birth control and sexual health, through the mail; In his opinion, the author adds, “obscenity, which he called a ‘hydra-headed monster,’ led to prostitution, disease, death, abortions, and venereal disease.”
The Man Who Hated Women focuses on eight female activists in Comstock’s crosshairs: among others, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; the anarchist and syndicalist emma goldman; Planned Parenthood Founder and Noted Eugenicist Margaret Sanger; abortionist ann “madam restell” lohman; and homeopath Sarah Chase, who fought censorship by calling a birth control device the “Comstock syringe.” Weaving together the stories of these women, Son identifies striking parallels between 19th- and 20th-century debates and contemporary threats to abortion rights. “Risking destitution, incarceration, and death,” the author writes in the book’s introduction, “[these activists] defined reproductive freedom as an American right, one as vital as those enshrined in the constitution. … without understanding them, we cannot fight the assault on women’s bodies and souls that continues even today.”
african europeans: an untold story by olivette otele
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In this sweeping chronicle, scholar Olivette Otele challenges white-centric narratives of European history by tracing the presence of Africans on the continent from the third to the 21st centuries. With a rich cast of characters, including Renaissance Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, 18th-century polymath Joseph Boulogne, and actress and artists’ muse Jeanne Duval, African Europeans artfully examines changing conceptions of race and how these ideas have given rise to shape to real-world experiences. and stories from the past.
“the term ‘European African’ is… a provocation for those who deny that one can have multiple identities and even citizenships, as well as those who claim that they do not ‘see color,’” otele writes in the book’s introduction . . “The goals of this volume are to understand connections across time and space, to debunk persistent myths, and to revive and celebrate the lives of African Europeans.”
bradford pearson’s heart mountain eagles
Life at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated between August 1942 and November 1945, was marked by harsh winters, inadequate medical care and racist treatment by some white staff and locals. however, about a year after the camp opened, the prisoners got an unlikely source of hope: high school football. As journalist Bradford Pearson writes in Eagles of Heart Mountain, the team, made up primarily of second-generation immigrants who had never played the sport before, went undefeated in the 1943 season and lost only one game the following year.
pearson juxtaposes the poignant story of the underdog eagles with details of how the players weathered the draft. Unwilling to fight on behalf of a country that had ordered their arrest, several of the young men refused to enlist, leaving them vulnerable to (further) imprisonment. “We are not being disloyal,” declared the Heart Mountain-based Fair Play Committee. “We’re not dodging the draft. we are all loyal Americans fighting for justice and democracy here at home.”
on time: a history of civilization in twelve clocks by david rooney
“for thousands of years”, argues david rooney in time, humans have “harnessed, politicized and armed” time, using clocks to “exercise power, earn money, govern citizens and control lives”. Former Curator of Timekeeping at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, home of the Greenwich Meridian, Rooney traces his fascination with watchmaking to his childhood, when his parents ran a watchmaking and restoration business. During a lifetime spent studying clocks, the scholar realized that the devices could be used as windows into civilization, revealing insights into “capitalism, knowledge sharing, empire building, and radical changes in our lives.” lives caused by industrialization”.
on time focuses on 12 clocks created over some 2,000 years, starting with a sundial in the roman forum in 263 b.c. to a plutonium time capsule clock buried in osaka, japan, in 1970. As the centuries passed, timekeeping tools became increasingly precise, a development that “would never [be] politically neutral,” notes the washington publication in its book review. instead, the standardization of time enabled capitalist efforts such as the opening and closing of financial markets and measures of social control, such as laws limiting when consumers can purchase alcohol. Overall, Rooney writes, his “personal, idiosyncratic, and mostly biased account” seeks to demonstrate that “monumental timekeepers mounted on top of towers or public buildings have been placed there to keep us in order, in a world of violent disorder, … as as far back as we care to look.”
america in flames: the untold story of police violence and black rebellion since the 1960s by elizabeth hinton
Between July 1964 and April 2001, nearly 2,000 urban riots sparked by racially motivated police intimidation, harassment, and violence erupted across the US. uu. These “explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order,” in the words of Elizabeth Hinton, are often characterized as riots, a term the Yale historian rejects in favor of “rebellion.” Citing a rich trove of historical data, Hinton’s America on Fire convincingly argues that black rebellions occur in response to police violence and not the other way around. president lyndon b. Johnson’s “war on crime” in the 1960s, for example, contributed to the growth of local police forces that “invaded all aspects of black social life, transforming typical juvenile transgressions into fodder for police attacks against young black people”, according to the New Yorker.
Published almost exactly a year after George Floyd was killed in police custody, America on Fire deftly draws parallels between the violence that followed the assassinations of civil rights leaders in the 1960s and the protests of 2020. “extraordinary” acts of police violence, such as the well-documented floyd murder, spark such rebellions today: “[t]he daily violence and humiliations that black people experience in encounters with the police are not addressed” , notes the washington post in its review of the book. “In this sense, Hinton argues that the status quo has won. ordinary police violence has been normalized, common and current. we respond only to its most brutal forms.”
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