2023: A Historian’s Reading List

My annual reading list, plus some other lists I made this year. Here is last year’s list and you can follow that back through previous years.

First, the historical and professional work. Let me use the same language I use ever year, since it’s a lot of books and people wonder how this is possible:

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.

If there’s anything interesting about this year’s reading list, it’s that I went fairly in on Irish history, which is related to my wife’s family and likelihood of spending more time over there in the future. We can debate whether discussion of the Irish past should fall closer to history than zoology in comments. I decided on their fundamental humanity for the purposes of this list.

I put asterisks next to 20 books I thought LGM readers should really read. These aren’t necessary the best books here, though there is some overlap, but rather ones that are a bit more accessible and also very good. There are certainly more than 20 very fine books here, but here are 20 of them for you. I also included links to various podcasts–assume that all these books are more than worth the time and are automatically recommended to you, so that really makes the list closer to 30. I am happy to spend part of tomorrow discussing the various books in comments, if you want or. have questions or whatever.

The history list is a bit shorter than last year, which is fine, as I read too much as it is.

1. Brett Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan ********
2. Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana
3. Emily Klancher Merchant, Building the Population Bomb
4. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America *******
5. Craig Calhoun and Benjamin Y. Fong, eds., The Green New Deal and the Future of Work
6. Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania
7. David Bates, The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903-1922
8. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War
9. Daniel L. Hatcher, Injustice, Inc.: How America’s Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor (Podcast)
10. Gerald David Jaynes, Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882
11. Bartow J. Elmore, Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future (Podcast)
12. Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father
13. Grace Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia
14. Janet Golden, Babies Made Us Modern: How Infants Brought America into the Twentieth Century
15. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition **************
16. Michael Honey, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice
17. Romain Huret, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Jean-Christian Vinel, Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies
18. Kenneth Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995
19. Lydia Barnett, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe
20. Erika Bsumek, The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (Podcast)
21. Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor, eds., Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession
22. Charles Romney, Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions, 1935-1950
23. Frank Stricker, American Unemployment: Past, Present, and Future
24. Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History
25. Eithene Quinn, A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood
26. Nicole Fabricant, Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore
27. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America
28. Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future *************
29. Kristin Wintersteen, The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem
30. Sheena Harris, Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman
31. Jason W. Smith, To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire
32. Robert H. Churchill, The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America
33. Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia *********
34. Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock, Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities (Podcast)
35. Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics *********
36. Elva Johnston, Literacy and Identity in Medieval Ireland
37. Clint Smith, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America ******
38. Mark McLay, The Republican Party and the War on Poverty (Podcast)
39. John Woodrow Cox, Children Under Fire: An American Crisis
40. Jeffrey A. Johnson, They Are All Red Out Here: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895-1925
41. Megan Asaka, Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City (Podcast)
42. Richard P. Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679-1749
43. Brian Fagan, Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization
44. Elizabeth Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness *********
45. Lisa Sousa, The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico
46. Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History *********
47. Tamika Mallory, State of Emergency: How We Win in the Country We Built
48. John Shattuck, Sushma Raman, and Matthias Risse, Holding Together: The Hijacking of Rights in America and How to Reclaim Them for Everyone
49. Jamie McCallum, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice ********
50. Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace *******
51. Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln
52. Stephen Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States (Podcast)
53. Brian Luskey, Men is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America *********
54. Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartography in Hawaii
55. German Vergara, Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850-1950
56. Mark Lause, Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class ********
57. Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969 *********
58. Katrina Forrester, In the Shadows of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy
59. Sarah Handley-Cousins, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War
60. Sarah Vogel, The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm
61. Shelton Stromquist, Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context 
62. Jacob Darwin Hamblin, The Wretched Atom: America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology *********
63. Nicholas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and Illegality in Mexican Chicago
64. Daniel D. Arreola, Postcards from the Baja California Border: Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s-1950s
65. Richard Whatmore, Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution
66. Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States ********
67. Stephen Crowley, Putin’s Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics between Stability and Stagnation
68. Kenneth O’Reilly, Asphalt: A History
69. Dael A. Norwood, Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America
70. Emmanuel Kreike, Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime against Humanity and Nature
71. Igarashi Yoshikuni, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970
72. Robert Kuttner, Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy
73. Ruth Coniff, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers
74. Greta de Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement  
75. Heather Mayer, Beyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1924
76. Bob H. Reinhardt, Struggle on the North Santiam: Power and Community on the Margins of the American West
77. John E. Schmitz, Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War
78. Susan North, Sweet & Clean: Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England
79. Brian Craig, Stringfellow Acid Pits: The Toxic and Legal Legacy
80. Daniel Akst, War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance ******
81. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People
82. Robert Cherny, Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend
83. Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant, Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods
84. Ben Vinson III, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico
85. Evelyn A. Schlatter, Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacy and the Search for a New Frontier, 1970-2000 ********
86. Thomas Beaumont, Fellow Travellers: Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914-1939
87. Lori Flores, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement
88. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
89. Thomas Wickman, Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast
90. Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America *******
91. Katherine Johnston, The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World  
92. Colmán Ó Clabaigh The Friars in Ireland, 1224-1540
93. Douglas K. Miller, Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century
94. Eduardo Contreras, Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco
95. Margaret Scull, The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968-1998
96. Aaron E. Sanchez, Homeland: Ethnic Mexican Belonging since 1900
97. Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
98. Richard Ivan Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe
99. Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal, and the Right Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States (Podcast)
100. Jacki Hedlund Tyler, Leveraging an Empire: Settler Colonialism and the Legalities of Citizenship in the Pacific Northwest
101. Karissa Haugeberg, Women Against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century
102. Erin Hatton, Coerced: Work under Threat of Punishment
103. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality 
104. Yu Tokunaga, Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations
105. Karl Theodore Hoppen, Governing Hibernia: British Politicians and Ireland 1800-1921
106. Richard Grayson, Dublin’s Great Wars: The First World War, the Easter Rising, and the Irish Revolution
107. David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
108. James Morton Turner, Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future (Podcast)
109. Dax-Devlon Ross, Letters to My White Male Friends
110. Laura F. Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Podcast)
111. Paul Conrad, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival
112. Felicia Angeja Viator, To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America **********
113. Jonathan Preminger, Labor in Israel: Beyond Nationalism and Neoliberalism
114. Amalia Leguizamón, Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina
115. Shanna Greene Benjamin, Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay
116. Anne MacKinnon, Public Waters: Lessons from Wyoming for the American West
117. Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America *******
118. Michele Shover, California Standoff: Miners, Indians, and Farmers at War, 1850-1865

I decided that to expand Fun with Lists, I’d keep track of the publishers of these books this year. This wasn’t as interesting as I’d hope, but I think I might keep this list up for the rest of my life, or as long as this blog exists, and maybe there will be more separation going forward. You can however see how different fields use different presses–everyone who reads academic work probably reads plenty from Oxford and Cambridge, but North Carolina does such a fantastic job for US history, Illinois is key for labor history, Nebraska for the U.S. West. Meanwhile, relatively big presses such as Stanford barely get my attention at all because there’s just not meaningful crossover with my interests.

1. Oxford—10
2. North Carolina—8
3. Cambridge—6
4. Princeton—5
5. Yale—5
6. Illinois—5
7. California—5
8. Harvard—5
9. Nebraska—4
10. Pennsylvania—4
11. Duke—4
12. New Press—3
13. Columbia—3
14. Washington—3
15. Norton—2
16. Basic—2
17. Oregon State—2
18. Texas—2
19. Oklahoma—2
20. Chicago—2
21. Cornell—2
22. Southern Illinois—1
23. Allen and Unwin—1
24. Johns Hopkins—1
25. Palgrave MacMillan—1
26. Tennessee—1
27. Crown (Penguin/Random House)—1
28. Minnesota—1
29. Boydell—1
30. Little, Brown—1
31. Edinburgh—1
32. Ecco (Harper Collins)—1
33. Penn State—1
34. Farrar/Strauss/Giroux—1
35. Stanford—1
36. Scribner—1
37. Black Privilege (Simon & Schuster)—1
38. Georgia—1
39. Bloomsbury—1
40. Arizona—1  
41. Michigan—1
42. Melville House—1
43. Liverpool—1
44. NYU—1
45. Beacon—1
46. Four Courts—1
47. Pantheon—1
48. Penguin—1
49. St. Martin’s—1
50. New Mexico—1
51. Stansbury–1

Here is my list of fiction and literary non-fiction I read this year. Turned out to be the exact same number of books as last year. Dates completed are here (which I just keep for my own interest) and the asterisk is for books I had read before. I was way ahead of last year’s pace, then the reality of the semester set in around late September….

1. Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, 1/5/23*
2. Tomas Eloy Martinez, Santa Evita, 1/11/23*
3. Driss Chraibi, Mother Comes of Age, 1/17/23*
4. Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz/Black Power, 1/17/23
5. Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100, 1/25/23
6. Judith Freeman, Red Water, 1/30/23
7. Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake, 2/1/23*
8. Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 2/7/23*
9. Maxim Osipov, Kilometer 101, 2/8/23
10. Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild, 2/15/23
11. Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 3/3/23
12. August Wilson, Fences, 3/3/23
13. Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree, 3/5/23
14. Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, 3/7/23
15. B. Traven, The Carreta, 4/10/23
16. Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 2: Dance and Dream, 4/23/23
17. Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen, 5/1/23
18. Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles, 5/16/23
19. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World, 5/17/23
20. Richard Price, Ladies’ Man, 5/20/23
21. J.A. Baker, The Peregrine, 5/22/23
22. Robert Gottlieb, ed., Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, 5/24/23
23. Wallace Stegner, Recapitulation, 5/26/23
24. S. Josephine Baker, Fighting for Life, 5/30/23
25. Don DeLillo, Mao II, 5/31/23*
26. Tomás Eloy Martínez, The Tango Singer, 6/10/23
27. Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind, 6/10/23
28. John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 6/11/23
29. Patricio Pron, My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain, 6/13/23
30. Robert Olen Butler, Wabash, 6/23/23
31. Simone Schwarz-Bart, The Bridge of Beyond, 6/23/23
32. Bob Gibson & Lonnie Wheeler, Pitch by Pitch: My View of One Unforgettable Game, 7//3/23
33. Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, 7/3/23
34. Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy, 7/10/23
35. Carl Hiaasen, Nature Girl, 7/15/23
36. Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks!, 7/15/23
37. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain, 7/16/23
38. Jack Gelber, The Connection, 7/16/23
39. Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, 7/16/23
40. Anonymous, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, 7/17/23
41. Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater, 7/22/23**
42. William Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues, 7/27/23
43. Henry James, Watch and Ward, 8/5/23
44. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, ed., The Best American Food Writing, 2020, 8/7/23
45. Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance, 8/14/23**
46. Martin Mull and Allen Rucker, The History of White People in America, 8/16/23
47. Edward P. Jones, The Known World, 9/5/23**
48. C. Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, 9/14/23**
49. Magda Szabó, Abigail, 10/16/23
50. Michel Laub, Diary of the Fall, 10/24/23
51. Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King, 11/26/23
52. Jose Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, 11/29/23**
53. Heike Gessler, Seasonal Associate, 12/1/23
54. Richard Ford, Rock Springs, 12/1/23**
55. William Faulkner, Go Down Moses, 12/17/23**
56. Chris Yogerst, The Warner Brothers , 12/20/23
57. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 12/29/23*
58. J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 12/30/23

Anyway,