The Best Books of 2023: History!

As Americans get dumber and attention spans get shorter, every publishing season sees more “micro-histories” than the one before, and all these “micro-histories” dangle the same allure: if you’ll just tear yourself away from TikTok for an hour, we’ll give you some history that's neat and discreet and video-game exciting. There's a pointed irony to this: readers in 2023 are living through some of the most momentous historical times in the history of the United States, and they're less interested in history than any previous generation. Fortunately, there'll always be that stubborn fraction of even the most benighted generation that insists on – even enjoys – delving deeply into the reading of history, and that reading fraction was well-served by history titles in 2023. These were the best of them:

10 In the Garden of the Righteous: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives To Save Jews During the Holocaust by Richard Hurowitz (Harper)

The stories Hurowitz assembles here are universally stirring and often incredibly sad: people risking everything to do whatever they can in order to save however many they can from the greatest evil of their day. The writing is immensely compassionate but never maudlin, which makes their impact more gut-punching.

9 No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggle of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books)

This searing study of the grim world freed slaves faced even when they managed to reach the world of slavery-free North (and particularly antebellum Boston, whose proud self-righteousness takes it on the chin in these pages) is likewise immensely compassionate but neither maudlin nor hectoring.

8 Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 by Peter Wilson (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

This big, dense military history is full of skillfully-drawn characters and the kind of very effective momentum that big histories almost never achieve, much less sustain. Many of the events and people in these pages are intensely familiar and well-covered things, but Wilson makes it all feel fresh.

7 The World: A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf)

This enormous book in many ways starts off as a puzzle and only deepens and broadens in both its reach and its oddness. The author does great sweeping set pieces with clear relish, but he also never met a digression he didn't like, and threading through it all is both his half-hearted attempt at a unifying theme and the vivid sense that any themes are decidedly secondary to the author's storytelling zest. There's never been a world history anything like this.

6 An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era by Beth Bailey (University of North Carolina Press)

Here Bailey tells in compassionate detail the harrowing story of how rising racial tensions in the US Army reached a boiling point as morale was cratering during the Vietnam War. Bailey vividly portrays all the major and minor players in the drama, from enlisted men to citizen lawyers and activists – it's amazingly involving history, chronicling the worst growing pains the Army had experienced in a generation.

5  Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America by Jeremy Jennings (Harvard University Press)

Alexis de Tocqueville is one of those rare historical figures who are synonymous with two different countries – he was French, but he wrote one of the most famous portraits of the United States. But Tocqueville traveled to other places in addition to America, and in these pages Jennings follows him on land and sea, always making sure the man himself, the character of the man, is foremost in every adventure.

4 Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe by Rachel Chrastil (Basic Books)

Chrastil isn't the first to position the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 as the foundation of the international tensions that would give rise to the First World War, but she attacks the various aspects of the war and its main actors with such narrative vigor that her account easily takes a place beside Michael Howard's definitive one from decades ago.

3 Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan (Knopf)

A world history like this, one that intimately joins human events to climate history, was inevitable, and readers are lucky a writer of Frankopan's skill is the first to do this kind of book for a mainstream press. Frankopan has already demonstrated how adept he is at broad-sweep narrative, and here it's raised to grand reading.

2 The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind A Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts by Christopher De Hamel (Penguin Press)

The story De Hamel tells here might take the outward form of a string of chapter-biographies concerning various book collectors, librarians, publishers, and even forgers, but this boisterous, wise, quietly amused book is really about the love of books. Here we have lives from different countries and different centuries, all centering on people for whom books were everything.

1 The Soviet Century: Archeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlögel (translated by Rodney Livingstone)(Princeton University Press)

This hefty book, by a comfortable margin the best history book of 2023, tells the 70-year story of the Soviet Union not mainly through its broad strokes but through its detritus, its artwork, its kitsch, and its whimsies. In evocative, sometimes pointedly eloquent prose, this book creates a great breviary of stories about the Soviet world. Even readers who lived through the Cold War will be endlessly fascinated and even moved.